Newsom

Transit or traffic

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Click here for the Clean Slate: Our printout guide to the Nov. 6 election

› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco is at a crossroads. The streets are congested, Muni has slowed to a crawl, greenhouse gas emissions are at all-time highs, and the towers of new housing now being built threaten to make all of these transportation-related problems worse.

The problems are complicated and defy simply sloganeering — but they aren’t unsolvable. In fact, there’s remarkable consensus in San Francisco about what needs to be done. The people with advanced degrees in transportation and city planning, the mayor and almost all of the supervisors, the labor and environmental movements, the urban planning organizations, the radical left and the mainstream Democrats — everyone without an ideological aversion to government is on the same page here.

The city planners and transportation experts, who have the full support of the grass roots on this issue, are pushing a wide range of solutions: administrative and technical changes to make Muni more efficient, innovative congestion management programs, high-tech meters that use market principles to free up needed parking spaces, creative incentives to discourage solo car trips, capital projects from new bike and rapid-transit lanes to the Central Subway and high-speed rail, and many more ideas.

In fact, the coming year promises a plethora of fresh transportation initiatives. The long-awaited Transit Effectiveness Project recommendations come out in early 2008, followed by those from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority’s Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (an unprecedented, federally funded effort to reduce congestion here and in four other big cities), an end to the court injunction against new bicycle projects, and a November bond measure that would fund high-speed rail service between downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But first, San Franciscans have to get past a few downtown developers and power brokers who have a simplistic, populist-sounding campaign that could totally undermine smart transportation planning.

On Nov. 6, San Franciscans will vote on propositions A and H, two competing transportation measures that could greatly help or hinder the quest for smart solutions to the current problems. Prop. A would give more money and authority to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency while demanding it improve Muni and meet climate change goals.

Prop. H, which was placed on the ballot by a few powerful Republicans, most notably Gap founder Don Fisher (who has contributed $180,000 to the Yes on H campaign), would invalidate current city policies to allow essentially unrestricted construction of new parking lots.

New parking turns into more cars, more cars create congestion, congestion slows down bus service, slow buses frustrate riders, who get back into their cars — and the cycle continues. It’s transit against traffic, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

"If we are serious about doing something about global warming, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: people are going to have to drive less and take transit more" was how the issue was framed in a recent editorial cowritten by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, arguably the board’s most conservative member, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, who wrote Prop. A.

Peskin says Prop. H, which Prop. A would invalidate, is the most damaging and regressive initiative he’s seen in his political life. But the battle for hearts and minds won’t be easy, because the downtown forces are taking a viscerally popular approach and running against city hall.

The San Francisco Examiner endorsed Prop. H on Oct. 22, framing the conflict as between the common sense of "your friends and neighbors" and "a social-engineering philosophy driven by an anti-car and anti-business Board of Supervisors." If the Examiner editorialists were being honest, they probably also should have mentioned Mayor Gavin Newsom, who joins the board majority (and every local environmental and urban-planning group) in supporting Prop. A and opposing Prop. H.

The editorial excoriates "most city politicians and planners" for believing the numerous studies that conclude that people who have their own parking spots are more likely to drive and that more parking generally creates more traffic. The Planning Department, for example, estimates Prop. H "could lead to an increase over the next 20 years of up to approximately 8,200–19,000 additional commute cars (mostly at peak hours) over the baseline existing controls."

"Many, many actual residents disagree, believing that — no matter what the social engineers at City Hall tell you — adding more parking spaces would make The City a far more livable place," the Examiner wrote.

That’s why environmentalists and smart-growth advocates say Prop. H is so insidious. It was written to appeal, in a very simplistic way, to people’s real and understandable frustration over finding a parking spot. But the solution it proffers would make all forms of transportation — driving, walking, transit, and bicycling — remarkably less efficient, as even the Examiner has recognized.

You see, the Examiner was opposed to Prop. H just a couple of months ago, a position the paper recently reversed without really explaining why, except to justify it with reactionary rhetoric such as "Let the politicians know you’re tired of being told you’re a second-class citizen if you drive a car in San Francisco."

Examiner executive editor Jim Pimentel denies the flip-flop was a favor that the Republican billionaire who owns the Examiner, Phil Anschutz, paid to the Republican billionaire who is funding Prop. H, Fisher. "We reserve the right to change on positions," Pimentel told me.

Yet it’s worth considering what the Examiner originally wrote in an Aug. 2 editorial, where it acknowledged people’s desire for more parking but took into account what the measure would do to downtown San Francisco.

The paper wrote, "Closer examination reveals this well-intentioned parking measure as a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum. Like all propositions, Parking For Neighborhoods was entirely written by its backers. As such, it was never vetted by public feedback or legislative debate. If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

The San Francisco Transportation Authority’s Oct. 17 public workshop, which launched the San Francisco Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study, had nothing to do with Props. A and H — at least not directly. But the sobering situation the workshop laid out certainly supports the assessment that drawing more cars downtown "is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

City planners and consultants from PBS&J offered some statistics from their initial studies:

•San Francisco has the second-most congested downtown in the country, according to traffic analysts and surveys of locals and tourists, about 90 percent of whom say the congestion is unacceptably bad compared to that of other cities.

•Traffic congestion cost the San Francisco economy $2.3 billion in 2005 through slowed commerce, commuter delays, wasted fuel, and environmental impacts.

•The length of car trips is roughly doubled by traffic congestion — and getting longer every year — exacerbating the fact that 47 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from private cars. Census data also show that more San Franciscans get to work by driving alone in their cars than by any other mode.

•Traffic has also steadily slowed Muni, which often shares space with cars, to an average of 8 mph, making it the slowest transit service in the country. Buses now take about twice as long as cars to make the same trip, which discourages their use.

"We want to figure out ways to get people in a more efficient mode of transportation," Zabe Bent, a senior planner with the TA, told the crowd. She added, "We want to make sure congestion is not hindering our growth."

The group is now studying the problem and plans to reveal its preliminary results next spring and recommendations by summer 2008. Among the many tools being contemplated are fees for driving downtown or into other congested parts of the city (similar to programs in London, Rome, and Stockholm, Sweden) and high-tech tools for managing parking (such as the determination of variable rates based on real-time demand, more efficient direction to available spots, and easy ways to feed the meter remotely).

"As a way to manage the scarce resource of parking, we would use pricing as a tool," said Tilly Chang, also a senior planner with the TA, noting that high prices can encourage more turnover at times when demand is high.

Yet there was a visceral backlash at the workshop to such scientifically based plans, which conservatives deride as social engineering. "I don’t understand why we need to spend so much money creating a bureaucracy," one scowling attendee around retirement age said. There were some murmurs of support in the crowd.

Rob Black, the government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which is the most significant entity to oppose Prop. A and support Prop. H, was quietly watching the proceedings. I asked what he and the chamber thought of the study and its goals.

"We have mixed feelings, and we don’t know what’s going to happen," Black, who ran unsuccessfully against Sup. Chris Daly last year, told me. "The devil is in the details."

But others don’t even want to wait for the details. Alex Belenson, an advertising consultant and Richmond District resident who primarily uses his car to get around town, chastised the planners for overcomplicating what he sees as a "simple" problem.

Vocally and in a four-page memo he handed out, Belenson blamed congestion on the lack of parking spaces, the city’s transit-first policy, and the failure to build more freeways in the city. Strangely, he supports his point with facts that include "Total commuters into, out of, and within San Francisco have only increased by 206,000 since 1960 — more than 145,000 on public transit."

Some might see those figures, derived from census data, as supporting the need for creative congestion management solutions and the expansion of transit and other alternative transportation options. But Belenson simply sees the need for 60,000 new parking spaces.

As he told the gathering, "If someone wants to build a parking lot and the market will support it, they should be able to."

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) is generally allied with the downtown business community on most issues, but not Props. A and H, which SPUR says could be unmitigated disasters for San Francisco.

"SPUR is a pro-growth organization, and we want a healthy economy. And we think the only way to be pro-business and pro-growth in San Francisco is to be transit reliant instead of car reliant," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told me in an interview in his downtown office.

He agreed with Belenson that the free market will provide lots of new parking if it’s allowed to do so, particularly because the regulatory restrictions on parking have artificially inflated its value. "But the negative externalities are very large," Metcalf said, employing the language of market economics.

In other words, the costs of all of that new parking won’t be borne just by the developers and the drivers but by all of the people affected by climate change, air pollution, congested commerce, oil wars, slow public transit, and the myriad other hidden by-products of the car culture that we are just now starting to understand fully.

Yet Metcalf doesn’t focus on that broad critique as much as on the simple reality that SPUR knows all too well: downtown San Francisco was designed for transit, not cars, to be the primary mode of transportation.

"Downtown San Francisco is one of the great planning success stories in America," Metcalf said. "But trips to downtown San Francisco can’t use mostly single-occupant vehicles. We could never have had this level of employment or real estate values if we had relied on car-oriented modes for downtown."

Metcalf and other local urban planners tell stories of how San Francisco long ago broke with the country’s dominant post–World War II development patterns, starting with citizen revolts against freeway plans in the 1950s and picking up stream with the environmental and social justice movements of the 1960s, the arrival of BART downtown in 1973, the official declaration of a transit-first policy in the ’80s, and the votes to dismantle the Central and Embarcadero freeways.

"We really led the way for how a modern dynamic city can grow in a way that is sustainable. And that decision has served us well for 30 years," Metcalf said.

Tom Radulovich, a longtime BART board member who serves as director of the nonprofit group Livable City, said San Franciscans now must choose whether they want to plan for growth like Copenhagen, Denmark, Paris, and Portland, Ore., or go with auto-dependent models, like Houston, Atlanta, and San Jose.

"Do we want transit or traffic? That’s really the choice. We have made progress as a city over the last 30 years, particularly with regard to how downtown develops," Radulovich said. "Can downtown and the neighborhoods coexist? Yes, but we need to grow jobs in ways that don’t increase traffic."

City officials acknowledge that some new parking may be needed.

"There may be places where it’s OK to add parking in San Francisco, but we have to be smart about it. We have to make sure it’s in places where it doesn’t create a breakdown in the system. We have to make sure it’s priced correctly, and we have to make sure it doesn’t destroy Muni’s ability to operate," Metcalf said. "The problem with Prop. H is it essentially decontrols parking everywhere. It prevents a smart approach to parking."

Yet the difficulty right now is in conveying such complexities against the "bureaucracy bad" argument against Prop. A and the "parking good" argument for Prop. H.

"We are trying to make complex arguments, and our opponents are making simple arguments, which makes it hard for us to win in a sound-bite culture," Radulovich said.

"Prop. H preys on people’s experience of trying to find a parking space," Metcalf said. "The problem is cities are complex, and this measure completely misunderstands what it takes to be a successful city."

When MTA director Nathaniel Ford arrived in San Francisco from Atlanta two years ago, he said, "it was clear as soon as I walked in the door that there was an underinvestment in the public transit system."

Prop. A would help that by directing more city funds to the MTA, starting with about $26 million per year. "I don’t want to say the situation is dire, but it’s certainly not going to get better without some infusion of cash to get us over the hump," Ford told the Guardian recently from his office above the intersection of Market and Van Ness.

The proposed extra money would barely get this long-underfunded agency up to modern standards, such as the use of a computer routing system. "We actually have circuit boards with a guy in a room with a soldering iron keeping it all together," Ford said with an incredulous smile.

The other thing that struck Ford when he arrived was the cumbersomeness of the MTA’s bureaucracy, from stifling union work rules to Byzantine processes for seemingly simple actions like accepting a grant, which requires action by the Board of Supervisors.

"Coming from an independent authority, I realized there were a lot more steps and procedures to getting anything done [at the MTA]," he said. "Some of the things in Prop. A relax those steps and procedures."

If it passes, Ford would be able to set work rules to maximize the efficiency of his employees, update the outdated transit infrastructure, set fees and fines to encourage the right mix of transportation modes, and issue bonds for new capital projects when the system reaches its limits. These are all things the urban planners say have to happen. "It should be easy to provide great urban transit," Metcalf said. "We’re not Tracy. We’re not Fremont. We’re San Francisco, and we should be able to do this."

Unfortunately, there are political barriers to such a reasonable approach to improving public transit. And the biggest hurdles for those who want better transit are getting Prop. A approved and defeating Prop. H.

"It’s clear to people who have worked on environmental issues that this is a monumental election," said Leah Shahum, director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and an MTA board member. "San Francisco will choose one road or the other in terms of how our transportation system affects the environment. It will really be transit or traffic."

Shahum said the combination of denying the MTA the ability to improve transit and giving out huge new parking entitlements "will start a downward spiral for our transit system that nobody benefits from."

"We are already the slowest-operating system in the country," Ford said, later adding, "More cars on the streets of San Francisco will definitely have a negative impact on Muni."

But even those who believe in putting transit first know cars will still be a big part of the transportation mix.

"All of it needs to be properly managed. There are people who need to drive cars for legitimate reasons," Ford said. "If you do need to drive, you need to know there are costs to that driving. There is congestion. There are quality impacts, climate change, and it hurts transit."

"There are parking needs out there, and the city is starting to think of it in a more responsive way. We don’t need this to create more parking," Shahum said. "If folks can hold out and beat down this initiative, I do think we’re headed in the right direction."

Yet the Yes on A–No on H campaign is worried. Early polling showed a close race on Prop. A and a solid lead for Prop. H.

Fisher and the groups that are pushing Prop. H — the Council of District Merchants, the SF Chamber of Commerce, and the San Francisco Republican Party — chose what they knew would be a low-turnout election and are hoping that drivers’ desires for more parking will beat out more complicated arguments.

"The vast majority of San Franciscans call themselves environmentalists, and they want a better transit system," Shahum said, noting that such positions should cause them to support Prop. A and reject Prop. H. "But they’re at risk of being tricked by a Republican billionaire’s initiative with an attractive name…. Even folks that are well educated and paying attention could be tricked by this."

For Metcalf and the folks at SPUR, who helped write Prop. A, this election wasn’t supposed to be an epic battle between smart growth and car culture.

"For us, in a way, Prop. A is the more important measure," Metcalf said. "We want to focus on making Muni better instead of fighting about parking. We didn’t plan it this way, but the way it worked out, San Francisco is at a fork in the road. We can reinforce our transit-oriented urbanity or we can create a mainly car-dependent city that will look more like the rest of America."

Money and politics

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The upcoming election hasn’t generated much voter interest, with only a couple of measures that seem likely to have an impact. But corporate interests in San Francisco and beyond are still spending big money — in ways that are secretive, suspicious, and sometimes contradictory — to influence the election and win the gratitude of elected officials.

Although the final preelection campaign statements were due Oct. 25, the money continues to roll in. And perhaps most ominously, many campaign committees are spending far more than they are taking in, effectively using this accrued debt to hide contributors until after the election.

And almost invariably, the person at the center of such schemes — who facilitates the most creative and unsettling spending by downtown political interests — is notorious campaign finance attorney Jim Sutton, who also serves as Mayor Gavin Newsom’s treasurer (and didn’t return our calls for comment by press time).

Political donations are supposed to be transparent and reflect popular support for some campaign. But once again, this election is showing the disproportionate influence that corporations have on local politics and the difficulties faced in trying to accurately trace that influence.

There are "No on K" billboards all over San Francisco, showing a giant image of a man’s empty pocket alongside the dubious claim that "Proposition K will cut $20 million from Muni." The signs were created and funded by Clear Channel Outdoor.

Prop. K is an advisory measure that the Board of Supervisors placed on the ballot this fall to ask whether voters want to restrict advertising on public spaces like bus stops. But it was aimed at Clear Channel Outdoor’s contract to maintain 1,100 city bus shelters and sell advertising on them, which was approved by the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 23. In exchange, the CCO agreed to pay the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $5 million annually, plus 45 percent of its annual revenues from shelter ad revenues.

Nonetheless, the measure would put city voters on record as opposing the CCO’s basic business model, so the company fought back. The "No on K — Citizens to Protect Muni Services" filing suggests that there is no citizen involvement in the No on K campaign. So far, No on K has only received donations from Clear Channel Outdoor, including $120,000 in cash and $55,750 in in-kind contributions of radio time and ad space.

Maybe Clear Channel really is trying to help Muni get more money, rather than pad its own profits. After all, its parent corporation, Clear Channel International, donated $20,000 to support Muni reform measure Proposition A — authored by Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin — on Oct. 15, just days before Clear Channel Outdoor won its big bus transit deal with the city.

Yet following the corporate money even further makes it clear that altruism isn’t what motivates corporate spending. No on K also benefited from independent expenditures by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce 21st Century Committee, a general-purpose committee created in 1999, which received major funding this year from the Gap ($10,000), Pacific Gas and Electric Co. ($7,500), Bechtel ($5,000), Catholic Healthcare West ($5,000), and Clear Channel Outdoor ($1,000).

The 21st Century Committee also spent $716 for newspaper ads opposing Prop. A, which would net the MTA at least $26 million per year from the city’s General Fund. Sutton — a former chair of the California Republican Party — and his associates effectively control the 21st Century Committee, which is also helping Newsom, his top client, avoid facing the Board of Supervisors in public. The committee has made independent expenditures opposing Proposition E, a charter amendment that would require the mayor to make monthly appearances before the board, something voters approved last year as an advisory measure. According to Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard, defeating that measure is the mayor’s top priority this election.

"I think he’s focused on his own race and also Question Time. There’s where he’s spending his resources," Ballard said when asked why Newsom isn’t campaigning or fundraising for the Yes on A and No on H campaigns, even though he supports those positions.

The 21st Century Committee has also made independent expenditures in support of Proposition C (which would require public hearings for measures that the board or the mayor places on the ballot), Proposition H (see "Transit or Traffic," page 18), Proposition I (which would establish an Office of Small Business), and Proposition J (Newsom’s wireless Internet advisory measure).

Each of these ballot measures has a committee dedicated to raising funds, but as of Oct. 25, only the Small Business Campaign (Yes on C) appeared to have no outstanding debts, or accrued funds, as they are called in campaign finance circles. Maybe that’s because the Small Business Campaign got $10,000 from the 21st Century Committee, $5,000 from PG&E, $2,500 from AT&T, $8,500 from the SF Small Business Advocates, and $1,000 from the Building Owners and Manufacturers Association of San Francisco’s political action committee.

Yes on C also got a $7,500 contribution from the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund, which has ties to Clear Channel, the MTA, and efforts to influence local transportation policy. Records show that on Nov. 4, 2005 — just before the election — the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund reported a $6,900 "loan" for radio airtime and production costs from Clear Channel to help defeat a measure that would have split the MTA appointments between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors.

Fast-forward to Oct. 3 of this year, when the Committee on Jobs, which reported its "loan" as accrued funds for almost two years, reported that this debt has now been forgiven. Which is odd, given that, as of Oct. 25, the Committee on Jobs had a cash balance of $778,000 — and had just received $35,000 from financier and Committee on Jobs board member Warren Hellman, $35,000 from AT&T, and $50,000 from the Charles Schwab Corp.

Equally interesting is the fact that the day after the Oct. 25 preelection filing deadline, the Committee on Jobs gave $25,000 to the Sutton-controlled No on E: Let’s Really Work Together Coalition. Such large late contributions require a notice to Ethics that can often escape notice by the media and voters.

The donation perhaps went to help balance the committee’s books; despite receiving $85,084 in monetary contributions, including $10,000 from attorney Joe Cotchett and society maven Dede Wilsey, No on E spent $110,244 before Oct. 25, leaving it with $26,610 in accrued debt.

No on E isn’t the only Sutton-controlled committee whose spending has outpaced donations received: as of Oct. 25 the Yes on H–No on A pro-parking committee and Newsom’s WiFi for All, Yes on J committee, not to mention the Gavin Newsom for Mayor campaign, were all registering large amounts of accrued debt.

Having these debts isn’t illegal. And it’s not unusual for a campaign to have a pile of unpaid bills at the time of its last preelection finance filing. But as Ethics Commission director John St. Croix told the Guardian, accrued funds "shouldn’t be used to hide who your contributors are. The idea of disclosure is to let voters know ahead of elections who is trying to influence their vote."

St. Croix points to the fact that committees are required to make reports every 24 hours in the 16 days before an election "so you know what they are spending on…. But if committees don’t report campaign contributions and people fundraise after the election, that could be a de facto way to hide who the contributors are."

And while Sutton has been characterized by many, including the Guardian (see "The Political Puppeteer," 2/2/04), as the dark prince of campaign finance, St. Croix says he doesn’t automatically suspect something is wrong just because a campaign has a lot of accrued debt.

"But if people suspect that to be the case and they file a complaint, Ethics investigates," St. Croix said, adding that for him, "really massive accrued funds would be a red flag."

Asked what he meant by massive, St. Croix said, "It depends on the office. You might expect a lot more to accrue in a mayor’s race or large campaigns that tend to do a lot of last-minute spending."

As of Oct. 25, Gavin Newsom for Mayor had received $1.1 million and spent $1.3 million, had a cash balance of $457,994 — and was reporting $97,548 in accrued debt, with $46,500 owed to Storefront Political Media, the company run by Newsom’s campaign manager, Eric Jaye.

Noting that Ethics’ job is "to get people to file on time and chase after those who don’t," St. Croix said that those who don’t file and are making major expenditures right before an election are the ones who will face the biggest fines. "They could face $5,000 per violation, which could be $5,000 for every contribution that was made to finance a smear campaign and wasn’t reported," he said.

The biggest fine the Ethics Commission has ever issued was $100,000 for Sutton’s failure to report until after the 2002 election a late $800,000 contribution from PG&E to help defeat a public power measure.

Compared to other years, the amounts of accrued debt in this election may look small, but former Ethics commissioner Joe Lynn points to a disturbing pattern in which Sutton-controlled committees were insolvent before the election, then raised funds later or, as in the case of the Committee on Jobs, magically saw their debts forgiven.

"If I am a candidate running for mayor, like Gavin Newsom, and I personally rake up $100,000 in debt and have a big financial statement, then that means there’s a creditor willing to advance me those funds," Lynn said. "But if the debt has been raked up by a ballot measure committee, then who is responsible? Why would vendors spend $10,000 for that committee unless they knew that debt was wired from the get-go?"

But the result is the same: voters don’t know who donated to the campaign until after the votes have been cast. A clear historical example of this debt scheme can be seen in the June 2006 No on D Laguna Honda campaign. In its last preelection report, No on D had $59,750 in contributions, $18,664 in expenditures — and $130,224 in debt.

But during the 16 days before the election, No on D suddenly got $110,000 in late contributions from the usual suspects downtown, including $2,500 from Hellman, $15,000 from Turner Construction, $10,000 from Wilsey, $2,000 from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and $2,500 from the Building Owners and Manufacturers Association of San Francisco.

As Lynn explains, campaign finance laws only require disclosure of contributions, not expenditures, made in the 16 days before an election — and only $64,000 worth of the contributions used to pay off No on D’s accrued expenses were disclosed, with $10,000 each from the California Pacific Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente trickling in on or after Election Day.

This year campaign finance watchdogs like Lynn note that the Sutton-controlled Yes on H–No on A committee has been hiding its contributors. In its first preelection report, filed Sept. 22, Yes on H showed $113,750 in contributions, $111,376.18 in expenditures, and $69,806.98 in accrued debt.

A month later it has doubled its contributions, tripled its expenditures — and had increased its accrued debt to $77,509. Lynn predicts that Yes on H’s accrued debt will be paid down by late contributions after the election or forgiven later on.

"The solution to the debt scheme is twofold," Lynn said. "Prosecute people doing the scheme and pass a law prohibiting campaigns from making more expenditures than they have contributions. Technically there is nothing illegal about reporting more debt that you have the cash or contributions to pay, but no businessperson regularly offers services in situations where it isn’t clear that they will be paid."

Since the Oct. 25 filing deadline, late contributions have continued to pour into No on E big-time, for a total of $59,500. That includes $25,000 from the Committee on Jobs, $2,500 from Jonathan Holzman, $6,000 from Elaine Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, $1,000 from Chris Giouzelis, $1,000 from Nick Kontos, $1,000 from Farrah Makras, $1,000 from Victor Makras, $1,000 from Makras Real Estate, $5,000 from John Pakrais, $1,000 from Mike Silva, $1,000 from Western Apartments, $5,000 from Maurice Kanbar, and $5,000 from the San Francisco Apartment Association PAC.

The Yes on A committee hasn’t used the accrued debt scheme, but it has been the second-largest recipient of late contributions. It received $57,000 in late contributions, with donations from Engeo ($1,000), Singer Associates ($2,500), Trinity Management Services ($10,000), Elysian Hotels and Resorts ($5,000), Luxor Cabs ($1,000), Marriott International ($15,000), the SF Police Officers Association ($2,000), Sprinkler Fitters and Apprentices ($1,500), Barbary Coast Consulting ($2,500), and SEIU International ($3,397.14).

No on H (Neighbors Against Traffic and Pollution) received $4,500 in late contributions, with donations from Norcal Carpenters, Alice and William Russell-Shapiro, and Amandeep Jawa. And in what looks like a classic case of hedging bets, Singer Associates has made a $2,500 late contribution to both Yes on H and No on H.

Steven Mele, who is treasurer for Yes on A and No on H, told the Guardian, "There’s some people that time their contributions, but their names are out there, reported on public sites. A lot of corporate money comes in prior to the last deadline, then some afterwards. If campaigns are running with a lot of accrued debt, then those people must have an idea of what money is going to come in."

Unlike the campaigns controlled by the Sutton Law Firm, Mele’s committees, which work with Stearns Consulting, are not carrying massive loads of unpaid debt. Yes on A had received $302,452 and spent $279,890 and had $17,749 in debt as of Oct. 25. No on H had received $134,458 and spent $124,088 and had no debt as of Oct. 25.
Mele also believes that while campaign finance rules were written to make the money trail more transparent, "They’ve resulted in the public being inundated with so much information that they tend to glaze over."

Campaign sewer overflows

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The flow of election cash is often a filthy river that you wouldn’t want to drink from, and a recent local lawsuit, coupled with a new bit of state legislation, has muddied the waters even more.

On Sept. 20, US District Court Judge Jeffery S. White granted a preliminary injunction preventing the city from enforcing key sections of its Campaign Finance Reform Ordinance.

Two local groups with a sordid history of influencing elections with large chunks of cash — the Building Owners and Managers Association and the Committee on Jobs — argued in court that campaign contribution limits violate the First Amendment by financially curbing the ability to communicate a message (see "Pressing the Scales," 8/22/07). The contribution limits of independent-expenditure committees stumping for candidates were set by the voter-passed Proposition O in 2000 after the 1999 reelection of Mayor Willie Brown, in which deep-pocketed business interests backed the mayor in exchange for preferential treatment by city hall.

Prop. O capped contributions to IEs at $500, and people and corporations are allowed to give no more than $3,000 total (e.g., $500 each to six committees).

Those caps are no longer enforceable.

Similar injunctions have been granted in San Jose and Oakland, also destroying local contribution caps in those cities. San Jose appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and is waiting for a ruling. Ann O’Leary, a lawyer in City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office, told us San Francisco is waiting to see what happens in San Jose before making the next move, though an appeal is planned regardless of that outcome. In the past the Supreme Court has ruled that the appearance of corruption in elections is sufficient grounds for restricting campaign contributions, and San Francisco’s history provides ample examples from which to draw to support that decision.

"We don’t know if it will get back to court before November 2008," O’Leary said of the case, "but it’s certainly something to watch in that election."

Meanwhile, over in Sacramento, legislators on cruise control recently passed a bill that may make it impossible for San Francisco to write its election laws anyway. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just signed Assembly Bill 1430, and according to the legislative digest, the new law "prohibits local governments from adopting campaign finance ordinances that restrict communications between an organization and its members unless state law similarly restricts such communications, or by regulation by the Fair Political Practices Commission."

Proponents say the new law will resolve conflicting interpretations of campaign finance regulations, but opponents say it preserves wide-open loopholes in the Political Reform Act that local jurisdictions have tried to close. For example, a person may be prohibited by the city from giving more than $500 to support a certain candidate. That person can, however, give as much as $30,200 to the Democratic Party, which can then "communicate" a message of support for that candidate to its members.

A recent and egregious example: in San Diego the county Republican Party spent almost $1 million on local races in 2006.

The bill was authored by Carlsbad Republican Martin Garrick and flew through the State Assembly unopposed. Assemblymember Mark Leno told us it came to the Elections Committee, on which he sits, with no vocal opposition, so he gave it an aye. One of his aides, however, became concerned and started making calls. Eventually, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters rallied against it, but it only hit a speed bump in the State Senate. There was still too much support from the Democrats to kill it. Leno said, "It’s an uncommon situation to have the left and right supporting something that in fact runs counter to local election laws."

Only nine senators opposed the bill, including Carole Migden and Leland Yee. "She thought it was an end around campaign finance laws," Migden aide Eric Potashner told us.

San Francisco’s Ethics Commission also took a look at the bill and gave it a 5–0 thumbs-down, resolving to send a letter to both the mayor and the Board of Supervisors urging them to speak against it. Neither did. "The Mayor supports AB1430," his press secretary, Nathan Ballard, told us by e-mail. "He has some concerns about the local control issue, but ultimately those concerns are overridden by his belief that groups like labor unions and the Democratic Party should be allowed to communicate directly with their members."

The governor’s signature now makes it more difficult to pass future measures like Prop O.

Neither the injunction nor the new law seems to be affecting the Nov. 6 election — the FPPC won’t be ruling on AB 1430 until January, though the commission is holding a hearing for interested people to speak in Sacramento on Nov. 2.

Though BOMA and the Committee on Jobs stated in their filing for the injunction that the law harms their ability to raise and spend money for candidates in this November’s election, nothing on record with the Ethics Commission shows they’ve been putting up a lot of money for Newsom, Kamala Harris, or Michael Hennessey. But there’s always next year.

Mayor moving on peaker deal

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The Board of Supervisors had a little shake-up today in the middle of a conversation on the city’s deal to build a new peaker power plant.

One of the biggest selling points from proponents of the $230 million natural gas fired power plant has been that it will receive the “Reliability Must Run” contract from CA-ISO, the state energy agency that dishes out those kinds of things. Right now the Mirant Potrero plant has that RMR, and city officials and activists have been trying for several years to get that plant to close down because it spews more filth into the air than a newer one would. Without an RMR, which essentially pays the power plant owner to NOT run unless needed during peak energy hours, it becomes financially dicey to keep the lights on, but Mirant has never definitively said they’d pull the plug if the city built its own power plant. Some folks, including us, have expressed concern that we could end up with two power plants.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano was intending to slap a couple of amendments onto the resolution the board heard today regarding the peaker plant, one of which would have urged the PUC to get an iron-clad guarantee from Mirant that they’d shut down. In the middle of the supes grilling the PUC on the peaker contract, Sup. Aaron Peskin interjected with the late-breaking news that Mayor Gavin Newsom was at that very moment negotiating with Mirant for a signed agreement that the plant would shutter for good if their RMR is removed.

Some of the supes seemed a little surprised by the news, if not miffed. (Gav’s got a bit of a thing for trumping.) Rumors outside the chamber were that the Mayor’s office has been working on this for awhile, and part of the negotiation may have to do with some city assistance with cleaning-up of the old power plant site and maybe a little fast-tracking of the permitting process for Mirant to put it to some other, more lucrative use. (Condos, anyone? Anyone around here need another $2 million condo?)

No one from the Mayor’s office got up to speak about it (nor the Mayor himself, though it was his day to shine in front of the supervisors. More on that after Prop E passes.) They haven’t issued a press release yet, and I swung by the press office but no one there knew anything about it. Supes Mirkarimi, Daly, and Alioto-Pier voted still voted against the resolution.

UPDATE:

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi tells us we got it wrong — he introduced the resolution amendments, not Tom Ammiano. Sorry about that — we missed the beginning of the hearing, and got the amendments through a fax from Ammiano’s office. The hearing isn’t up on SFGTV yet, so we’ll take Mirkarimi’s word that the amendments are part of the resolution.

They urge the SFPUC to do two things:
1. secure the closure of Mirant as a condition before operating the peakers. (Mayor’s on that one.)

2. “…stipulate a controlled operating regimen that reduces the usage of the CT’s as renewable in-city generation capacity comes on-line consequent to implementation of City’s renewable energy plan under Community Choice Aggregation and other renewable power sources.” (So, essentially, curb the peakers as we put up the solar panels.)

Also, here are some PDFs which prove the point commenter Eric Brooks makes below that the peakers will spit out about the same amount of pollution as Mirant does now:

Testimony of Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s engineer Barry Young at 10/23 SFPUC hearing

Images that quantify the testimony

Newsom’s interests vs. San Francisco’s

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gavin_newsom.jpg
I was writing a story about the long-term damage that Prop. H — which will entitle every land owner to build new parking lots, regardless of their traffic-inducing impacts or the desires of certain neighborhoods to limit parking — could do to San Francisco when Mayor Gavin Newsom called me. Actually, it was just Newsom’s voice in a robo-call urging me and others to vote against Prop. E, the mayoral question time measure, arguing that it won’t fill any potholes or put more cops on the street. Although Newsom is on record supporting the muni reform measure Prop. A and against Prop. H, the campaigns are frustrated that Newsom has done nothing to fundraise or campaign for them. “I think he’s focused on his own race and also question time. That’s where he’s spending his resources,” Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard told me when I asked about it.
So, there are two important measures on the ballot which will have a long term impact on quality of life in San Francisco. And there’s a measure that only affects Newsom personally, and perhaps his long term political ambitious if question time shows he can’t handle real unscripted debate. And Newsom ignores the big measures to focus on the small. If there was ever a telling testament to Newsom’s priorities — placing his own interests above San Francisco’s — this is it.

P.S. The Examiner had an interesting interview with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has a monthly question time with that city’s legislators that it tough but ultimately good for him and for democracy. “It keeps me in touch with the people.” One more reason Newsom should embrace it instead of fighting it.

From our Bay to Norway

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› johnny@sfbg.com

I hear a new world calling me. It’s beeping transmissions from some faraway place in the future and the past where a mysterious craft hovers near calypso rock and choruses of friendly voices — some human, some not — echo or call to each other. It’s a free-floating territory charted by someone obsessed with creating and sharing sounds that would otherwise go unheard. Only those with a similar obsession seem to respond to its clarion call.

I hear a new world, so strange and so real. Something tells me this world has ties to Norway and the Bay Area, that it streams from Oslo to San Francisco and back. Along the way it opens doors — some familiar, some not — to unheard-of zones. In Norway it can’t help isoutf8g and celebrating a conga rhythm from a vintage Michael Jackson track. It also combines the famous chords of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and the roller coaster sensuality of Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–produced "I Feel Love" in order to fill and feel space with as much pleasure as possible. In San Francisco it forms warm electronic waves, uses white magic to surf those waves’ white diamond tips at midnight, and then wakes up the next morning with a heartbreaking conversational hymn.

I hear a new world, haunting me from beyond the known realms of space disco, the shorthand term writers have applied to the music of Norway’s Lindstrøm (who has combined Strauss with Summer), Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje (the aforementioned Jackson mix master). It asks me to explore the songs of San Francisco musicians who offer clues to — and share — those Norwegians’ vast and prodigious love of sound and song. It suggests I contact Sorcerer (a.k.a. Daniel Judd) and Hatchback (a.k.a. Sam Grawe), brothers in oceanic melody and rhythm, who have both been remixed by Thomas. It tells me to talk with Dominique Leone, whose gorgeous and deranged pop will soon be released by Lindstrøm on his Feedelity label. It implores that I reach across this small town of super sounds to speak with Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos, who has forged a cluster of electro-Nordic projects in which beauty emerges — with a sunlike glow — from intensity.

I hear a new world, calling me to chart links between musicians in San Francisco and in Norway, to discover that neighboring, unacquainted San Francisco sound makers can share friendships with the same Norwegian musicians. Perhaps this musical passage from Norway to our Bay is pure folly. Perhaps the seaside Northern European kingdom recently voted the most peaceful country in the world by the Global Peace Index doesn’t share the same spirit as coastal Northern California. Perhaps the country that remained neutral in World War I and rebelled against insurgent World War II Nazism doesn’t have much in common with Bay Area resistance. Perhaps Oslo and San Francisco only share a pocket-size but ferocious love of black metal. I still hear a new world — how can I tell what’s in store for me?

THE BEACHSIDE BRAIN WAVES OF SORCERER


Donna Summer has already come and gone on the jukebox of the Van Ness corner bar with the bright yellow sign as Sorcerer’s Daniel Judd looks at the cover art for Prins Thomas’s Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo). Thomas’s epic, oft-resplendent two-CD mix opens with "I Hear a New World," the title track of producer Joe Meek’s innovative 1960 exploration of the outer spaces of stereo and studio sound. It then segues into the country twang and power-chord dub of "Devil Weed and Me," by the late-’70s Nashville, Tenn., session-player supergroup Area Code 615. "It’s funny that the CD starts that way," Judd says with characteristic almost-sly-or-shy understatement. "My friend Sam [Grawe, of Hatchback,] is a big fan of Area Code 615, and I love "I Hear a New World." The fact [Thomas] put those two songs together is weird, like he was reading our minds."

Encyclopedic musical passions bring serendipity. But Thomas and Judd’s bond dives deeper: Thomas has remixed "Surfing at Midnight," the slow-blooming single from White Magic (Tirk), the first album Judd has recorded as Sorcerer. White Magic is a casual labor of love (all too rare in these studied-yet-throwaway days) that’s easy to fall for on the first listen. Judd — who sometimes writes about music for the Web site Dream Chimney — is still capable of the Johnny Marr–like rush, push, and spangled jangle he brought to the band Call and Response, but freed from group strictures he lands on a relaxed approach to writing and recording that allows for gorgeous chord changes, compositions that morph, and keyboards and guitars that shimmer.

White Magic’s track listing primarily consists of two-word titles — "Airbrush Dragon," "Egyptian Sunset," "Bamboo Brainwave" — that inspire visualization, and on MySpace, Judd invents a variety of apt and funny pseudogenres, such as "’80s montage music," to describe the Sorcerer sound. "So many friends, when I played [Sorcerer’s] music for them, would say, ‘This would be great for an ’80s movie scene or a montage,’" he explains when asked about the various substyle terms he coined on a lark. "I definitely grew up during that period and watched the movies, so it’s ingrained. I thought I might as well just go for it. I like having some humor and playfulness, like Thomas Fehlmann, the Kompakt [label] guy who was in the Orb…. At some point [more recently] electronic music got caught up in always trying to do something new. That’s fun for the musician but not always for the listener. In my stuff the beat isn’t what’s making you go, ‘Oh wow.’ If it’s happening, it’s from the chords."

Judd and his girlfriend recently moved from Oakland — where he’d also spent much of his early childhood with a mom who loves Prince — into the Mission. Sorcerer, however, can usually be found loitering on either side of a magic door where kitsch transforms into loveliness. One side of that door definitely opens onto the beach. White Magic‘s "Blind Yachtsman" is a love child born from Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman and yacht rock. Judd often draws on whatever he’s listening to or watching, but other seafaring Sorcerer songs, such as "Surfing at Midnight" and "Hawaiian Island," flow directly from his experiences while surfing and scuba diving.

"Maybe the beach represents this free place, away from computers and technology," Judd posits when I mention that Norwegian counterparts such as Terje (whose MySpace interests are "Coconuts, Hawaiian sunsets, moose/dolphins/unicorn/practically everything in a sunset") share his fondness for littoral motifs. Whether discussing his girlfriend’s most recent Midnites for Maniacs–ready movie rental (Side Out, a beach volleyball drama starring C. Thomas Howell) or a weekend visit to Nippon Goldfish Co. on Geary ("You’re so close to the animals, and they look kind of crazy"), Judd keeps returning to the waterfront. "In the ocean," he notes, "you feel like there’s almost no rules. You’re having fun, and it’s almost dangerous fun — a kind that you don’t find in the city."

THE RISING AND SETTING SUNS OF ARP


A setting sun, bisected by clouds, hovers over darkening ocean waves on the cover of In Light, the first album by San Francisco’s Arp; the title, drawn in slim neon-tube cursive by San Francisco artist Tauba Auerbach, is suspended from the upper left-hand corner of a tangerine and gold sky. The summer sun happens to be setting outside the upper Guerrero living room window of Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos as he talks about this image (partly inspired by the melancholic found-film cosmograms of visual artist Tacita Dean) and how it relates to the music on the album, which will be released by the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound next month.

"An overwhelming number of people still tend to think of electronic music as being cold," Georgopoulos says while sitar notes from an LP quietly resonate through his and roommate Kathryn Anne Davis’s blue-walled apartment, where a large chunk of coral rests on a clear Plexiglas coffee table. "I wanted to make something that was warm, that had human qualities, that was a little worn, and that — along with the imagery of the record — dealt with memory, the degradation of memory, and revisionist memory. I also wanted to make something that referenced landscape and light and natural things in a way that wasn’t new age." I point to a fat tome about the proto–new age label ECM on a nearby bookcase, which Georgopoulos built. "Proto–new age music, if you select carefully, can be amazing," he responds. "Even the kernels of early sequencing in Ash Ra Tempel sound really radiant."

If a new age of electronic music spanning from San Francisco to Oslo is dawning (or setting), then Georgopoulos — a chief member of Tussle until just after the group recorded last year’s Telescope Mind (Smalltown Supersound) — has taken it to the bridge and maybe even been the bridge. In 2002, after writing about the graphic design of Smalltown Supersound’s Kim Hiorthøy for Tokion, Georgopoulos — who edits the music section of SOMA magazine and sometimes contributes to the Guardian — offered to put together a Bay Area showcase at Club Six for the label. "I don’t think he had done anything like that before; he just wanted to have us over, which was very generous," label owner Joakim Hoaglund recalls via e-mail before turning to a discussion of his and Georgopoulos’s latest collaboration. With Arp, "it’s a relief [for me] to do a small personal project. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel [In Light] has this great and unique mix of US West Coast art and culture with European avant-gardism and kraut rock. It’s a very special album."

Clutter and clusters are on Georgopoulos’s mind as we discuss music and its surroundings. "I was a huge stacker [of books and records]," he says when I mention his well-ordered home studio. "But I take after my mother — she’s very neat and feels like she can’t do the work she needs to do unless things are organized." The first-generation American child of parents from France and Greece, Georgopoulos has chosen the dreamy, maternal lull of a track titled "St. Tropez" to open In Light before "Potentialities" surges out of speakers (or from headphones) with a subtly rising force that’s ultimately awesome to behold. Most of In Light‘s seven meditative tracks were first showcased in a 2006 group exhibition at New Langton Arts, where up to two listeners could climb into a feather bed enclosed in a small podlike space. "It wasn’t cerebral. It wasn’t about dissecting a suspended space," Georgopoulos says. "Though with a lot of [Arp]’s music, suspension is one of the effects I’m trying to create."

For Georgopoulos, Arp’s state of suspension runs counter to different kinds of tension. While discussing his love for the analog organ-drum machine sounds employed by groups such as Cluster (a few of whose albums have just been reissued by Oakland label Water), Suicide, and Spacemen 3, he notes that "too much electronic [today] sounds like coke-related music." In contrast, Arp’s electronic music is humane — a rarity not just in electronic music but also on the streets of San Francisco during the Gavin Newsom era, when homelessness has become more difficult and abject and attitudes toward it more hostile. "I can’t remember the last time I left the house and didn’t have a confrontation with a very disturbing sight, and after a long time that really starts to chip away at you," Georgopoulos says. "I drove a cab for four years, until 2004, and when I think about it I can’t believe that I did. It suited my life at the time, but you’re interacting with [people on] PCP, meth, and all kinds of shit — you just never know. Now that I don’t drive a cab I’m hardly ever in the Tenderloin."

PRINS THOMAS, LINDSTRØM, AND THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND


Wearing a pair of shades, Prins Thomas is chatting with the doorman of his hotel in the Tenderloin when I stumble out of a taxi to interview him. It’s a sunny, hot late afternoon, but Thomas — who has just woken up — isn’t exactly on Norway time or California time. Later in the evening he’ll be DJing Gun Club’s night at Temple Nightclub. Right now, though it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, the moment calls for a meal, so we settle into a restaurant on Polk Street. "I used to play in Oslo for the same people again and again," he says after we order food. "Now I can travel and meet like minds. It’s inspiring to meet people who can help you out and who you can help out."

In San Francisco two such people are Sorcerer’s Judd and Hatchback’s Grawe. Only after remixing tracks by Judd’s and Grawe’s solo projects did Thomas discover (by following Web links) that they also record together as Windsurf. Next year he plans to release some Windsurf recordings on a new label, Internasjonal, that will step outside the Norwegian and dance music confines of his established label, Full Pupp. This season, though, he and Lindstrøm have released — in addition to a variety of vinyl projects — a full-length collaboration (Reinterpretations, the beat-driven follow-up compilation to their 2006 debut on Eskimo) and individual mix CDs. Lindstrøm has contributed a chapter to the mix series Late Night Tales (released by the label of the same name), while Thomas has unleashed Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo), a two-and-a-half-hour CD cornucopia that moves from strange and delightful multigenre tracks by Glissandro 70 (the bizarrely beautiful "Bolan Muppets") and Metalchicks (the awesome "Tears for Fears/Conspiracy") through Hawkwind into the classic disco of "Get Down Boy" by Paper Dolls.

"I thought it fit the whole collection as an introduction," Thomas says when I ask him about Cosmo Galactic Prism‘s opener, "I Hear a New World," which Arp’s Georgopoulos also says he’s included in mixes. "It kind of sets the tone — it’s so freaky that anything that comes after it is going to sound pretty normal. When I first heard it I couldn’t tell if it was new or old. There’s a similar quality to a track by Art Blakey called "Oscalypso" [from the 1956–57 album Drum Suite, now on Dusty Groove]. The drums are so distorted that it sounds relevant next to new, compressed dance music, even though it’s 50 years old."

It isn’t surprising that Thomas’s expansive love for and knowledge of music stems from his family. "My stepfather has been as obsessed with music [as I am]," he explains while charting Lindstrøm’s background in country and gospel bands and his own early days DJing hip-hop records at youth clubs. Thomas’s stepfather "would play Ry Cooder and the Sex Pistols for me. He had the Robert Christgau Consumer Guide books, which are great. I think it’s funny how [Christgau] can write similarly about an Eric Clapton album and a Chic album. For me, it really isn’t about bad music or good music, but about music that excites you and music that doesn’t."

It also probably isn’t surprising that one genre Thomas’s stepfather didn’t like — prog rock — figures heavily in his and Lindstrøm’s music. As for newer terms or styles, like Lindstrøm (who good-naturedly told me, "I guess the good thing is that some people are telling me I invented a genre"), Thomas has a sense of humor about the phrase space disco. "It could have been a lot worse," he says. "It could have been called crunk or syrup [Houston’s cough syrup–influenced hip-hop sound]. In my hometown, at underage school dances 15-year-old girls used to soak their tampons in moonshine. I guess that’s the Norwegian version of syrup."

UP, UP, AND AWAY WITH DOMINIQUE LEONE


When I meet Dominique Leone, he’s sitting in a San Francisco café that might have the highest number of laptops per square foot. Leone has one too, but instead of staring into its screen he’s feverishly using a pencil to draw on a page in a sky blue Strathmore sketchbook. I’m not surprised, because scribbler nonpareil Sol LeWitt caps a list of audio and visual influences on Leone’s MySpace page. That site also offers an opportunity to hear the gorgeous song "Conversational," on which Leone’s spare keyboard arrangement and ascendant choirboy-gone-slightly-cuckoo voice update the plaintive yet celestial highlights ("I’ll Be Home," "Living Without You") of Harry Nilsson’s classic 1970 cover collection Nilsson Sings Newman (Buddha).

Leone’s MySpace page contains audio treats, but what about his sketchbook page? It turns out he’s drawing, in his words, "a giant skyscraper-sized robot that streams music and scents into the air and every 10 minutes or so spews out free kittens." Indeed, Leone’s sketch does look a bit like that, so when he says he’ll try his hand at an idea I have — a constellation that playfully demonstrates links between San Francisco and Norway musicians — I take him up on the offer.

Though Leone doesn’t include himself in the finished rendering ("More an exploding molecule than a constellation," he says), which accompanies this article, he belongs in a nearby orbit, thanks to his collaborations with Lindstrøm. In addition to providing the quiet heart of that artist’s Late Night Tales mix, "Conversational" is also featured on an EP, simply titled Dominique Leone, that Lindstrøm is releasing next month on Feedelity (with art by Hiorthøy) as a precursor to Leone’s album. The gonzo centerpiece of the EP is "Clairevoyage — a Medley Performed by the 16th Rebels of Mung," on which Lindstrøm and Oslo Bee Gees maniacs Mungolian Jet Set, responding to Leone’s song "Claire" (on the EP’s B-side), construct a 12-minutes-plus propulsive fantasia that builds to a helium-voiced climax not far from the munchkin antics of Meek’s "I Hear a New World." Leone is no slouch at reaching countertenor octaves naturally or through tape manipulation. But since the EP also credits Mungolian figures named Katzenjammer and Izzy Tizzy as vocalists, it’s anyone’s guess as to who has inhaled a few balloons before singing.

Leone says he grew up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and the latter’s influence is especially apparent in the semielated, semiagitated high harmonies that fly through intricately braided compositions like his "Nous Tombons dans Elle." A self-described "band nerd" in high school and music major at Texas Tech University, he feels a kinship with the more overtly postmodern academic songwriting approaches of friends such as Matmos and Kevin Blechdom. To Lindstrøm, though, he’s a 21st-century answer to the progressive pop of Todd Rundgren (who happens to be a favorite of Sorcerer as well). "I remember the first time Lindstrøm wrote to me [about my music]. He was talking about Paul McCartney, but his big thing was Rundgren," Leone says with a laugh. "I wasn’t a big Rundgren fan, but [Lindstrøm] wasn’t the first person to listen to my music and mention Rundgren.

"The first track [‘Forelopic Bit’] on Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas is, to me, the best example of how to make a dance track from prog and fusion influences," Leone notes before adding some observations that probably stem from his experience as a freelance music writer for Pitchfork more than from his far-flung everyday listening tastes, which have ranged from salsa to bluegrass over the past few months. "A lot of people are trying to [bring prog and fusion to dance floors] right now. You can go out [to a club] and hear these Balearic and beardo DJs just playing tracks. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But Lindstrøm is one of the few guys who are actually trying to make original songs incorporating those influences."

A HATCHBACK DRIVE TO WINDSURF


Sam Grawe of Hatchback and Windsurf sings the praises of his Sony tape recorder as I place my old, cheap, and wonderful Panasonic next to some glasses of wine on a table in his home recording studio. Plastic owl wall fixtures and a rug with shaded steps of color that resemble the volume bars of a digital stereo rest above and below the assortment of keyboards (including that prized prog possession, the Rhodes) in the room. "You can listen to instrumentals as background music, but I’ve always been into [moments] when music connects you with what’s happening or what you’re doing," Grawe says. "So much of my [youth] was spent driving around the rural countryside and finding the perfect song. Sound can fulfill an opening or void in your emotional experience. Images can be part of it, smell can be part of it, but sound can take it to another level."

Grawe’s sympathy for trusty old tape recorders, his playfully decorated recording space, and the attentiveness to setting in his reminiscence all make sense — by day he is the editor in chief of the modern architecture and design magazine Dwell. By night and whenever else he can find the time, he listens to and makes music. It’s an enduring passion that goes back to high school years spent using MIDI to put music theory into practice and compose fugues in the manner of Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. "The guy who stocked the import section [at a nearby record store] was some crazy prog freak," Grawe remembers. "A friend of mine had The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock, so I could read about some crazy Italian or German band and then go to the mall and buy the CD."

"White Diamond," the 21st-century prog rock of Gibraltar that Hatchback has just made public (on the UK label This Is Not an Exit), showcases the fuguelike interplay between simplicity and complexity in Grawe’s compositions. While a 17-minute remix by Prins Thomas adds club elements, the original version, with its hallucinatory, starlit varieties of arpeggio, makes for an ideal personal soundtrack. Hatchback’s next 12-inch release on This Is Not an Exit, a track called "Jet Lag," is funkier yet similarly majestic, layered, and emotive. In both cases vocals would be a pointless distraction — synthesizers seem to sing to one another, becoming increasingly, endearingly creaturelike by song’s end. "Friends chide me for not knowing the words to songs I’ve heard a thousand times," Grawe says after testifying to his love for the film scores of Vangelis, Piero Umiliani, and Francis Lai. "But often a little synth part [in a song] is more interesting to me."

Grawe sings on some of the Windsurf songs that he and Judd have recorded for Prins Thomas to release on Internasjonal. Windsurf allows him to tap into a longtime interest in duos and groups ranging from the many projects of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Neu!’s Michael Rother (Grawe recently contributed liner notes to an upcoming reissue of Rother’s first solo album, 1977’s Flammende Herzen, by Oakland’s Water) to … Steely Dan. "To a lot of people they embody what’s wrong with music," Grawe says of the last. "But to me they embody everything that’s right. Not only is their music well crafted, but some of their lyrics, to me, are on a par with [Bob] Dylan."

As for Oslo and San Francisco, Grawe — who recently created a Venn diagram for Mike Bee of Amoeba Music that illustrates the fusion of influences within Sorcerer, Hatchback, and Windsurf — welcomes the growing, glowing galactic prism formed by artists from both areas who have an affinity for one another’s music. "I think it’s interesting that all these records happened without [the people involved] ever meeting in person or sometimes even talking on the phone," Grawe says. "It’s all been through the Internet. It was great to finally see [Thomas] when he came to town and hang out, have dinner, and play records. We connected instantly."

I HEAR A NEW WORLD


To trace musical connections between a pair of geographical areas is reductive. The artists I’ve written about love music from a number of other countries (Germany and Brazil, to name just two) and cumulatively have friendships with contemporary musicians from all over the globe. But in focusing on sonic signals being sent forth between Norway and our Bay, signals that have yielded some of my favorite recordings of the past year, I also discovered unexpected commonalities that open into new words about — and worlds of — sound. Almost all of the San Francisco musicians I spoke with also write about music, and three of them are journalists, for example. It seems the divisions between writers and musicians continue to blur, leading to the formation of a new music of the spheres.

When Joe Meek composed and recorded I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy (RPM) in England in 1960, his intense, obsessive love of music and sound resulted in the audio equivalent of what is called visionary. But he remained isolated. Today it’s great to see — and hear — figures such as Meek and disco innovator Arthur Russell living on, their spirits floating through many people’s songs and being revived in upcoming documentaries. Meek heard a new world of sound, calling him and haunting him. He couldn’t tell what was in store for him, but his new world of sound has arrived. It spans from Norway and our Bay to the farthest reaches of inner and outer space.

Hear it!

www.dominiqueleone.com

www.feedelity.com

www.myspace.com/feedelity

www.myspace.com/arp001

www.myspace.com/dominiqueleone

www.myspace.com/fullpupp

www.myspace.com/hatchback76

www.myspace.com/mungolianjetset

www.myspace.com/prinsthomas

www.myspace.com/sorcererjams

www.myspace.com/toddterje

www.myspace.com/windsurfmusic

www.smalltownsupersound.com

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The story of Q

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› sarah@sfbg.com

With just a couple of weeks to go until San Franciscans elect their next mayor, Quintin Mecke, the 34-year-old program director of the Safety Network, has emerged as Gavin Newsom’s top challenger.

Since declaring his candidacy, the fresh-faced Mecke has been endorsed by almost every significant progressive entity in the city, including supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi, BART board member and Livable City director Tom Radulovich, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the San Francisco Tenants Union, and the Guardian.

"Of all the mayoral candidates, Quintin has the longest record of working in the community and on important issues facing the city," said Daly, who was the first to publicly endorse the Pennsylvania native, shortly after Mecke declared his candidacy in August.

But despite his solid list of endorsers, Mecke hasn’t managed to raise much money. He didn’t come close to taking advantage of the mayoral public financing program created by Mirkarimi and approved by the most liberal members of the Board of Supervisors. Mecke said his late entry made it impossible to raise the required $25,000 (from at least 250 donors who could prove San Francisco residency) by the Aug. 28 deadline.

"Had I had more time, I don’t think raising the $25,000 is that much of a challenge," Mecke, a former Peace Corps volunteer, told the Guardian at the time. But two months later Mecke has only raised $11,203, with Sup. Tom Ammiano and former mayoral contender Matt Gonzalez respectively contributing $250 and $100, although neither has endorsed him yet.

With Newsom sitting on a $1.8 million war chest, Daly admits that it would take a perfect storm for Mecke to win.

"The incumbent would have to stumble between here and the finish line," said Daly, who toyed with running until Aug. 8, at which point Mecke dove into the race, challenging Newsom’s record on public safety, homelessness, and affordable housing — issues that Mecke has been intimately involved with since moving here a decade ago.

Mecke’s move to California came shortly after he survived a near-fatal climbing accident in Alaska, which shattered all of his teeth when he fell 40 feet off a glacier. The fall also saddled Mecke, who didn’t have health insurance, with $90,000 in medical bills.

"It was a humbling experience, but people have to take responsibility for the situations they find themselves in," said Mecke, who worked for Ammiano on arriving in San Francisco and has since worked on the Ammiano, Mirkarimi, and Gonzalez campaigns.

Mecke also helped found the South of Market Community Anti-Displacement Coalition, served as president of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, and helped author a report on homelessness that led him to publicly debate then-supervisor Newsom over his Care Not Cash initiative.

"Accountability without support is a form of cruelty," Mecke stated in 2002, a belief he still holds as he tries, as a member of the Homeless Shelter Monitoring committee, to get the city to implement universal shelter standards.

"If you raise the quality of life and safety standards in the city’s shelters, then more homeless people will want to enter them," Mecke said.

Mecke, a Western Addition resident, believes in community-driven responses to crime and violence. While Newsom claims that black-on-black violence has decreased under his administration, Mecke counters that African Americans make up only 7 percent of the city population but constitute 60 percent of the homicide victims. He thinks we need a real community policing program.

"We have 10 fiefdoms, 10 police districts," Mecke said. "That means that the oft-touted and talked about idea of community policing doesn’t really exist."

Newsom campaign manager Eric Jaye claims the only thing he knows about Mecke is that "he opposed Care Not Cash and he is supported by Sup. Chris Daly.

"But his own record? That’s a little bit harder," Jaye continued. "Mecke works for a city-funded nonprofit, but ironically, he’s unhappy with the violence prevention work the city is doing. Presumably he’s running because he thinks he can do a better job, but we’re proud of our progress on universal health care, our work on climate protection, our civic efforts, the fact that the eviction rate has plummeted, and that there’s more housing and affordable housing in the pipeline than [under] any other mayor in recent history."

But Mecke points out that the city’s health care initiative was Ammiano’s brainchild and that Newsom failed to deliver on his "wi-fi for all" promise by stubbornly pushing a flawed proposal and refusing to engage with its critics.

"Newsom’s only successes are initiatives proposed and led by members of the Board of Supervisors," said Mecke, who accuses Newsom of "making every decision within the framework of a national model while promoting some future candidacy."

He faults Newsom for asking for mass resignations this fall and sees the fact that Newsom is raising piles of cash to defeat Proposition E, which would require the mayor to make monthly appearances before the Board of Supervisors, as further evidence of his cowardice.

"San Francisco need to demand of this race that there’s public accountability," Mecke said. "Newsom seems to fear any form of nonscripted public interaction. When you go to his fake Question Time–town hall meetings you don’t actually get to ask the mayor your own question. He selects what he wants to hear."

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL It’s time for San Francisco to declare war on privatization.

The local threat is very real: as we reported in last week’s special anniversary issue, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration has moved to turn over a long list of city services — from housing for the mentally ill to the operation of the public golf courses — to the private sector. Should this happen, if history is any guide, the city would wind up losing millions, the quality of services would decline, and the economy would suffer as hundreds of well-paid, unionized employees lost their jobs.

Equally important, the public would lose control over the institutions that were and are created and run for its benefit.

Privatization is a recipe for corruption. There always has been and always will be some level of graft, corruption, and incompetence in government operations; there will always be the occasional city employee who sleeps on the job, fudges time cards, doesn’t do the job right, and somehow manages to avoid being fired. But that sort of small-time problem amounts to peanuts in comparison to what happens when large amounts of public money are turned over to the private sector.

Private companies are out to make profits — and for the most part they keep their finances secret. Many of the worst scandals in American history have involved kickbacks, backroom deals, and bribery aimed at sending taxpayer dollars into the coffers of big contractors, and these continue today. And the argument that the private sector is more efficient often turns out to be utterly false; the absolute worst waste of money in the nation’s health care system, for example, is the phenomenal overhead involved in private insurance plans. As much as 30¢ of every dollar spent on private-sector health care goes to administrative overhead and profit. The public Medicare system operates on about 5 percent overhead.

Of course, the public has no way of keeping track of where most of the private health care money goes; the insurance companies keep that information to themselves. So do most other private contractors that take public money. And even if you don’t like the way the system is managed, you don’t have much choice — insurance executives aren’t elected by anyone and aren’t accountable to the community.

San Francisco has a history of allowing private operators to take over public resources, and the results have been almost universally bad. One of the reasons the 1906 earthquake caused such devastation was that the private Spring Valley Water Co. — looking only for quick profits and not at long-term maintenance or service — failed to keep its pipes in good repair. When the city really needed water, to put out the postquake fires, it wasn’t available. That fiasco led city officials to develop a municipal water system, which now delivers some of the best, cleanest, and cheapest water in the country.

Of course, Congress gave San Francisco the right to build that water system, which uses a dam in Yosemite National Park, only on the condition that it also develop public electric power. Instead, in the greatest privatization scandal in the history of urban America, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wound up initially controlling much of the output of the dam, and it still controls the city’s electric grid. The result: some of the highest electric rates in the nation and terrible, unreliable service.

San Francisco officials led the way to the privatization of the Presidio, turning over a national park to an unaccountable quasi-private board that operates as a real estate developer. The results: A giant commercial office complex, built with a $60 million tax break. Plans for high-end condos. Traffic problems, neighborhood problems — and a stiff bill to the city’s taxpayers, who have to subsidize private businesses that operate in a federal enclave without paying local taxes.

And if Newsom has his way, the pattern will continue: the mayor’s signature project this past year, for example, has been an attempt to let a private company control the city’s broadband communications infrastructure. Tens of millions in city contracts go every year to private nonprofits that fight like hell to avoid sunshine and accountability.

Enough is enough — San Franciscans of every political stripe need to organize to fight back. This city needs a new political coalition, a campaign against privatization.

There are all sorts of specific policies and legislation that ought to be on the agenda. For starters, privatization expert Elliott Sclar, a Columbia University economist, argues that any private business that takes city money to provide public services ought to be required to abide by open-government laws. That means every scrap of information related to that contract — including financial projections, executive salaries, profit and loss statements, and operating overhead figures — would be public record. All meetings of boards, panels, or other policy-making entities involved in managing the contract would be open to the public. If a private business doesn’t want to abide by those rules, fine; it can stick to private-sector work and stop bidding on government contracts.

Beyond that, the city needs to set up a task force to look at every private contract San Francisco hands out and determine why the city isn’t doing the work itself. If selling electricity is so profitable (and it clearly is, or PG&E wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep its illegal monopoly), why can’t the city take over the job and bring in some revenue? If there’s money to be made building bus shelters and selling ads on them — and clearly there is, since Clear Channel Communications, a giant private company, went out of its way to get a contract with the city to do so — why can’t San Francisco make that money for the General Fund? If a private company can make money running the golf courses, why can’t the city?

Sure, there are times when it makes sense to bring in an outside contractor. We’d argue, for example, that the Board of Supervisors needs an independent budget analyst, not tied to City Hall, to monitor budgets and spending. But there are millions of dollars going out City Hall’s door every year to private outfits that aren’t accountable to the public. And there are millions of dollars that ought to be available for badly needed public services that the city is losing because some private operator is making a profit on public resources.

Organized labor has every reason to oppose privatization and ought to play a lead role in creating a new coalition. So should the public-power coalition and the folks who have been demanding sunshine for the nonprofits. But everyone who uses public services and pays taxes in San Francisco is affected when city money gets stolen, wasted, or diverted. It ought to be a broad-based coalition.

There’s an opportunity to turn things around here and make San Francisco the model city that it ought to be. There’s no time to waste.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Gavin Newsom will never live down his drunken affair with a close friend’s wife. It’s not a factor in this year’s mayoral race (which shows that San Francisco still has some class), but it’ll come back to haunt him someday, when he runs for governor or senator or wherever he goes next. Bill Clinton’s got the same curse — for all the good and bad things he did as president and everything he’s done since and will do, when he dies the world’s most famous blow job will be in the first paragraph of his obituary. Dumb stuff never goes away.

On the other hand, Clear Channel Communications is one of the most evil corporations in the United States, a sleazy outfit that is trying to destroy radio here and has gone a long way toward monopolizing the industry. Clear Channel treats its workers badly and is notoriously antiunion. It’s the worst sort of unaccountable conglomerate — many of its radio stations operate on remote control, with virtually no local staff, and it’s almost impossible to get through to anyone at corporate headquarters in San Antonio. Lowry Mays, its chairperson, is a big contributor to the Republican Party and to right-wing causes.

And yet none of that stopped the Board of Supervisors from giving Clear Channel tentative approval for a lucrative contract to build and sell ads on bus shelters in San Francisco. The whole thing annoyed me. If there’s so much money in bus shelters, why can’t the city build them and sell the ads and make some cash for the General Fund? But that aside, I have to ask: Why are we doing business with these people? Shouldn’t corporations, which want to be treated legally the same as individuals, be held accountable for their actions and their history?

At least Sup. Tom Ammiano brought up some of Clear Channel’s record. Some labor leaders tried to scuttle the deal. But the bus drivers’ union really wanted the contract approved, because Clear Channel will dump a bunch of money into Muni, so it went through, 9–1, with only Sup. Ross Mirkarimi opposed (and Sup. Chris Daly absent).

Then there’s Sutter Health.

On Saturday, Oct. 20, when nobody read the newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Sutter is going to effectively shut down St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission by turning it into an ambulatory clinic with an emergency room. No hospital beds, no place to put very sick people, nothing resembling the sort of service the district has counted on for decades. Instead, Sutter — which is allegedly a nonprofit but acts like a rapacious and greedy corporation — is going to stick San Francisco General with all of the uninsured sick people in the southeast neighborhoods while it gussies up its properties in the wealthier northern part of town.

The nurses have had to go on strike to demand better care for patients at Sutter. Even Mitch Katz, the city’s public health director, who is not known for blasting the private sector, has complained loudly that Sutter is doing a disservice to San Francisco.

And while all of this is going on, this allegedly nonprofit behemoth wants to build a $1.7 billion, 425-bed hospital at the old Cathedral Hill Hotel site at Van Ness and Geary.

Sutter only likes sick people who have good health insurance or are rich enough to pay cash. Perhaps the supervisors can remember that and hold these assholes accountable when they come to City Hall for a building permit.

Milk Club tonight — Leno and Migden

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The harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club meets tonight to consider a parliamentary procedure that could lead to an an early endorsement for state Sen. Carole Migden, who faces a challenge in next June’s primary from Assemblymember Mark Leno. Not surprisingly, the sleaze is flying

We haven’t endorsed in this race, and we won’t until next spring, but I have said, repeatedly, that both sides ought to play fair and keep it clean and try to avoid doing long-term damage to the progressive community. If Migden manages to disenfrancise Leno supporters at Milk, it will be one of those ugly moves that hurts the club’s credibility.

Everyone tries to pack club endorsements. The Milk Club rules are designed to block that, and this may be an unintended consequence. But there are plenty of people who are clearly legit, long-term members of the Milk Club, and if there’s any question about who gets to vote, it ought to be decided in a way that is as democratic as possible.

Migden’s a former club president, and has a lot of strong Milk allies. She’s been a Milk person for years, and Leno has been much more closely allied with the more moderate Alice B. Toklas Club. Migden doesn’t need to play any games here; Leno’s the underdog for this endorsement anyway.

By the way, perhaps the Milk Club members could ask Sen. Migden why she’s so fond of Republican Don Fisher,, and whether she will take the $7,200 he’s given her campaign and turn it over to the Yes on A/ No on H campaign.

And to keep the debate lively, they can ask Assemblymember Leno why he’s so supportive of Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Halloween Specials

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specials.jpg
Well, ain’t this special!
A Special Report from the Controller and the Legislative Analyst is recommending the establishment of an Office of Special Events.
The impetus for this special study came, says the report, from Sup. Bevan Dufty in the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to cancel a City-sponsored Halloween this year.
The report is already getting activists nervous.
That’s because one of its main thrusts is reviewing “whether the Entertainment Commission’s unfulfilled responsibility to attract and support special events (including those without sponsors) should officially be transferred to some other unit.”
That unit would most likely be contained within the Mayor’s Office.
Now, Piss-poor communication between the Mayor’s Office and the Entertainment Commission over Halloween 2007 became an open secret this year, after a public records request unearthed emails in which commissioners complained that the Mayor’s Office has been trying to avoid meeting with them to discuss plans to shift the event to the waterfront.
This may be why the Special Report recommends that the two be required to communicate in future, or it could be because, as the Special Report notes, a recent Civil Grand Jury found that “communication between the Entertainment Commission and the Mayor’s Office has not been sufficiently good to allow such efforts [promoting the development of a vibrant entertainment and late-night entertainment industry] to move forward.
Either way, it’s an interesting development ten days before this year’s non-event looms, and a tacit admission that no one in Room 200 is expecting to be able to kill Halloween 2008, which occurs on a Friday.
The report, which reviews the role of all the City’s major special events, not just Halloween, finds that San Francisco could benefit economically and culturally from additional special events, but that no city agency is currently focused on “attracting, creating and promoting” such events.
It suggests that the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which receives 56 percent of its $14 million budget from the City’s hotel tax to promote SF as a tourist destination, or another non-profit such as SF’s Grants For Arts, could play a larger role.
It also recommends that “ unsponsored events like Halloween are likely best managed by the Mayor’s Office in cooperation with a Private event producer.”
Stay tuned.

Fisher and his powerful friends

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hummer limo.jpg
Why does Republican billionaire Don Fisher have such influence in San Francisco? Why does Mayor Gavin Newsom subvert good planning simply because Fisher tells him to, then sit on the sidelines while Fisher tries to fool voters into creating gridlock in our downtown? Why would Senator Carole Migden want Fisher — who wants to subvert the public education system with vouchers and charter schools — to serve on the State Board of Education, let alone sing his praises in public while appointing him? Why does anyone still listen to the Fisher-sponsored SFSOS, which still draws elected officials to its luncheons? Is our political system so thoroughly corrupted by money that self-proclaimed liberal Democrats are willing to crawl in bed with such an ideological Neanderthal?
At the Yes on A, No on H rally in front of the Gap yesterday, near where they had parked the rented white Hummer (which H deems a “low-emission vehicle,” exempt from parking restrictions), Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin framed the issue for those of us who don’t want or need Fisher’s money: “San Franciscans have a clear choice. We can either pursue the Republican policies of the last century and continue to clog our roads and pollute our cities and poison our air, or we can move into the 21st Century.”

Jerry Brown gives City green light to sue Jew

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Photo by Charles Russo

The sun may be shining, but it’s raining legal cats and dogs for suspended Sup. Ed Jew.

On the eve of a preliminary hearing by the City’s Ethics Commission into charges of official misconduct by Supervisor Jew, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. has granted City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s application for leave to sue in quo warranto to remove Jew from the Board of Supervisors for failure to comply with the City Charter’s residency requirements .

The ruling comes a little more than three weeks after Mayor Gavin Newsom initiated official misconduct proceedings against Jew and suspended the District 4 supervisor, replacing him, at least for now, with political rookie Carmen Chu.

City Attorney Herrera says that in llight of the Ethics Commission’s preliminary hearing tomorrow, he intends, “to carefully evaluate” the legal options.
“In the coming days, I will decide how best to represent the City’s interest in concluding a crisis that has clouded the legitimacy of San Francisco’s representative government for too long,” Herrera said in a press release.

Tomorrow’s preliminary Ethics Commission hearing takes place at 1:30 p.m. in Room 416, City Hall.

Our 41st Anniversary Special

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This week, the Guardian celebrates 41 years at the forefront of the battle against dirty backroom deals, sleazy sellouts, illegal buy-offs, and underhanded intrusions into the public domain — and the fight continues. Click below for summaries, current updates, and histories of San Francisco privatization issues.

>> Editor’s Notes
A point-by-point list of Newsom’s privatization fumbles
By Tim Redmond

>> The privatization of San Francisco: an introduction
The city should be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America
By Tim Redmond

>> The perils of privatization: a cautionary history
Ronald Reagan started dismantling government 25 years ago, but his privatization legacy is alive and growing — even in San Francisco
By Amanda Witherell

>> Blast from the past
A few choice selections from our archives

>> Wrecked parks
Chronic underfunding has made the Recreation and Park Department a prime privatization target
By Sarah Phelan and Steven T. Jones

>> Psych out
Newsom administration pushes plan to privatize mental health treatment
By G.W. Schulz

>> Private practice
The Department of Public Health has taken privatization to a bizarre new level
By G.W. Schulz

>> Connect the Connects
Newsom uses a shadowy private organization to shield his administration’s actions from public scrutiny
By Steven T. Jones

>> Bilking the links
Public-golf revenue is up millions of dollars. But a costly public-private contract has swallowed most of the money
By J.B. Powell

>> Bus Stop
Muni remains a lucrative target for the private section
By G.W. Schulz

>> Privatize the airport?
Will SFO go on the block in 2011?
By G.W. Schulz

41st Anniversary Special: Bilking the links

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› news@sfbg.com

By now, even most nongolfing residents of San Francisco have heard the dire refrain coming from City Hall: San Francisco’s public golf courses are sucking millions of dollars from the city treasury! Dozens of media stories have trumpeted this bleak pronouncement, and city leaders are using the shortfall to push for outsourcing control of the century-old open spaces. But a Guardian review of the Golf Fund shows that the links are not nearly as down-and-out as pro-privatization forces have led us to believe.

Recreation and Park Department accounting documents we obtained show revenues at the city’s six publicly owned golf courses last year were up nearly $1.5 million from 2005 to 2006 and more than $2.2 million dollars from 2004 to 2005, an increase of nearly 30 percent. But the cost of a lavish contract with a large, out-of-state golf-management corporation has risen precipitously over the same time frame and drained most of these new funds.

For the 2006–07 fiscal year the city shelled out more than $3.25 million to Kemper Sports Management to operate the pro shop and clubhouse at the Harding Park Golf Course and its nine-hole neighbor, Fleming. By comparison, in 2004–05, Kemper’s tab at Harding and Fleming was a still eye-popping $2.07 million, but that number is nearly $1.2 million less than what the city had to pay last year. These increased costs, as well as a hefty loan repayment for Harding Park’s botched remodel in 2002 and 2003, have eaten up the links’ improved revenue and forced the city to throw in an extra $1.4 million from the General Fund to keep golf solvent.

"What’s going on up at Harding is a disaster," Bob Killian told the Guardian. Killian ran the city’s golf operations profitably for two decades until 2001. "When I was in charge we had contracts with various managers for the pro shops and the restaurants, and they made us money. They paid us. Now, Harding is run at a deficit. Where the fuck is the money going? What’s it for? Nobody knows. It’s all this big secret…. It’s a scandal."

Kemper’s seven-year deal is unique, to say the least. At every other publicly managed course, the city leases control of the pro shops and clubhouses to outside companies. In exchange for a flat fee paid into city coffers, those companies bear all of the risk and reap most of the rewards of operating the facilities. But at Harding, the city pays Illinois’s Kemper $192,000 per year, regardless of its performance, to act as an on-site manager, plus a 5 percent incentive fee for gross revenues over $6 million. But those guaranteed sums are only the beginning of the bill.

Kemper hires staff, rents golf carts, and orders the supplies to be sold in the pro shop and the clubhouse. Unlike in the city’s lease arrangements at other courses, though, the company bears none of the risk. It simply invoices the city for its expenses, and the city signs the tab. And the tab just keeps growing.

One public-golf insider who declined to be identified for fear of retribution said, "They’ve got this enormous staff there, managers and assistant managers and assistants to assistants of managers. It’s a golf course, not a hospital! I hear the payroll for the restaurant alone is like $600,000. And it’s only open for one shift a day…. They stock their pro shop with top-of-the-line gear that just sits there. If they order 20 Arnold Palmer shirts and only sell two, who cares? The city still pays for all 20."

In an e-mail to the Guardian, Kemper’s general manager at Harding, Steve Argo, told us it has between 60 and 80 employees, depending on the season. Citing this seasonal variability and "competitive reasons," he did not break down those numbers between management and nonmanagement, as we requested.

Both Argo and Katharine Petrucione, Rec and Park’s chief financial officer, attributed much of the added costs at Harding to the opening of a new permanent clubhouse there in late 2005. Argo said the increased revenues from the clubhouse have "more than covered the city’s increase in payments." But while Rec and Park’s ledgers do show that concessions revenues at Harding and Fleming have gone up since the clubhouse opened, the increase in Kemper’s bill has gone up nearly as much. All in all, with Kemper’s multimillion-dollar deal and loan payments for the over-budget remodel at the course, accounts still put the course at more than $500,000 in the red — even though a round of golf there now costs well over $100 and Kemper is still making a handsome profit.

It doesn’t end there. Petrucione said Kemper’s contract costs taxpayers even more than meets the eye. Because the company submits monthly and yearly budget projections as well as reams of invoices and expenses for reimbursement, Rec and Park staffers spend hours examining Kemper’s paperwork and activities — essentially managing the manager. When we asked her for an accounting of how much the Kemper contract costs the city in staff hours for these oversight duties, Petrucione replied, "It definitely requires more time and effort … than a lease agreement [like those at every other course] would."

During a recent radio interview, Sup. Jake McGoldrick called Rec and Park’s deal with Kemper "the worst contract I’ve ever seen." He added, "We don’t have a golfer problem. Golfers are coming out and playing. We have an accountancy problem."

The golf insider we spoke with echoed McGoldrick’s sentiments: "Business is up like 30 percent this year, but Kemper’s contract is jeopardizing the whole department…. If we redid the greens, tees, and fairways [at the other courses], just Band-Aid stuff like that, we would have the premier municipal system in the country. But instead they’ve given this cushy deal to a company from Chicago with no connection to San Francisco. It’s so unfair."

Despite the controversy over Kemper’s all-expenses-paid arrangement, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Rec and Park general manager Yomi Agunbiade, and others at City Hall have been using the deficits largely brought on by Kemper’s contract to push for more private control of the city’s links. In June the Mayor’s Office put forward a plan to outsource not just clubhouse and pro-shop management but all golf operations at the city’s premier courses, including Harding. The proposal was tabled after several contentious hearings at the Board of Supervisors, but many observers expect that it will make its way back to the board in the near future.

"In a perfect scenario, the city could [manage the courses efficiently], but the city has proven that it doesn’t have the ability to do it," Sup. Sean Elsbernd told us in July. Elsbernd has been one of the most vocal supporters of bringing in private golf management.

But McGoldrick, Killian, and other opponents of the idea point out that the city provided quality, inexpensive golf for nearly 100 years. They worry that private managers will find profit in higher greens fees, more part-time workers, and lower salaries and fewer benefits for full-time staff. But beyond those concerns, they see the mayor’s plan as yet another example of publicly owned assets being offered up for private gain.

The courses, McGoldrick told us, are "priceless…. We can’t just dump [them] because you’ve got folks from the Mayor’s Office and his Rec and Park Department who don’t want to be bothered."

In his endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said about the golf courses, "You gotta deal with the reality of where we are and what our core competencies are. Golf courses do not reflect a core competency of government. We’re losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and about to lose over a million dollars a year, and that comes from somewhere. So rather than continuing to do what we’ve done and hope for a different result, we’re looking at best practices across the country and finding ways to manage our assets differently, and I’m not apologetic for exploring those things."

41st Anniversary Special: Private practice

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Low-income tenants cheered late last year when the San Francisco Department of Public Health ended its housing contract with the John Stewart Co. But no one expected the alternative would be a secret $5 million deal between DPH officials and a preferred vendor.

In fact, the DPH has opened a new chapter in privatization by creating a dubiously accountable, quasi-independent nonprofit while paying someone else to operate it with a sole-source contract.

The health department leases several single-room-occupancy hotels in San Francisco that house mental health and substance-abuse patients through a program called Direct Access to Housing, part of a laudable nationwide trend toward deinstitutionalizing such medical clients and changing how the formerly homeless receive services.

The Camelot on Turk Street and Le Nain on Eddy Street were among those managed by John Stewart until last autumn. Mercy Housing oversaw two more. But there were problems; tenants complained about the Stewart company’s management, and political organizers last year charged that desk clerks at some of the buildings prevented them from registering tenants to vote.

"If you’re part of a larger company that just sees themselves as a more generic property-management company," said Marc Trotz, director of the health department’s housing office, "there isn’t necessarily the training and skills development that needs to be there to handle the complexities that come up on a daily basis with the population we’re dealing with."

So the health department’s answer was to broker an exclusive $5 million contract with a nationwide nonprofit based in San Francisco known as the Tides Center. Tides doesn’t do any of the heartwarming outreach we tend to associate with nonprofits. Instead, the outfit handles the boring administrative functions like payroll and human resources for community projects created by others.

The project in this case is Trotz’s brainchild Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing, which essentially exists as a nonprofit only on paper. There’s no board of directors. There are no federal tax forms outlining expenses and revenue. And Tides doesn’t itemize projects like DISH in its annual financial statements. So there’s no easy way for the public to track the money that goes into the project.

Yet DISH has so far never been forced to compete for property-management contracts like any other nonprofit wanting to do business with the city. That means the DPH gets the best of both worlds, paying someone in the private sector to manage its books and not having to subject its pet project to the competitive atmosphere of contract bidding.

Further, since Tides is technically the employer of record for DISH’s 60 or so employees, they exist in an ethereal world where they don’t fall under the city’s salary and benefits structure, but unions can’t reach them unless they’re willing to organize all 200 projects managed by Tides nationally.

Needless to say, none of this is sitting well with the nonprofits and unions that insist they weren’t informed of the plan until it was off and running.

"I feel like at union nonprofits, the turnover’s much lower, the training’s higher, and if a manager is abusing a tenant, for instance, a union worker can make a complaint to a city agency, write them up, do something without being afraid for their jobs," said Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, a former organizer for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. "And we just give better care."

The THC, whose workers are represented by Service Employees International Union Local 1021, says it was never formally invited to bid on DISH, despite the fact that it does extensive work with the city and manages more than 1,500 units of low-income housing.

"All they had to do to find out was send a letter or call us…. The fact that they made the effort to set up their own entity kind of shows that’s what they wanted to do," THC director Randy Shaw said.

The Tides contract so annoyed Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin that he drafted a resolution pointing out that Mayor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in 2004 calling for maximum competition in city contracts.

"This Board of Supervisors has been on record for years in wanting to make sure contracts are competitively and fairly bid," Peskin told the Guardian. "This whole thing seems rather bizarre. The government was in essence contracting with itself."

The health department’s Trotz dismisses this criticism, saying sole-source contracts were designed in the first place to allow for agreements like the Tides deal, which he calls a pilot project. Next time, he promises, the department will open the contract to bids. Trotz added that Tides is responsible if a DISH employee screws up, and it faces an annual monitoring probe by DPH staffers, just like any other contractor.

"I know now that THC and the union seem to be upset by this," Trotz said. "What we’re saying is we’ve heard that and we are doing what we always intended to do, which is run a two-year pilot and put a [request for proposals] out on the street and ready for people to apply to prior to the start of the next fiscal year."

Of course, no one’s suggesting Tides and DISH will necessarily do a poor job handling supportive housing. Shaw said lefties were the first to argue nearly three decades ago that nonprofits could address public health much more sensitively than did Dianne Feinstein’s mayoral administration of the 1980s. Last year the health department did $174 million worth of business with nonprofits. While unions have been slow to organize nonprofits, the trend is growing, but Tides and DISH seem structured to stiff-arm them when covert, sole-source contracts haven’t done that already.

"This obviously was a secret decision," Shaw said. "[The DPH] never consulted with anybody. They just did it. I don’t want to comment on the health department beyond what I’ve said. But this experience has left people very cynical about dealing with the health department [and] the way they handled the whole thing."

41st Anniversary Special: Wrecked park

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› news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has a long history of maintaining parks, community centers, and other recreational offerings. In fact, it controls more land in the city than any other entity, public or private. But after seeing its budget repeatedly slashed during lean fiscal years, the underfunded department has become a prime target for some controversial privatization schemes.

There are ongoing efforts to privatize city golf courses, supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Rec and Park general manager Yomi Agunbiade (see “Bilking the Links,” page 22). And there are ongoing fears that the city intends to privatize its popular Camp Mather vacation spot, something the RPD studied a few years ago and Sup. Jake McGoldrick has fought and highlighted.

Rec and Park has identified $37 million in needs at Camp Mather — the product of a private study the agency has been unable to fully explain to the public (see “From Cabin to Castle,” 4/4/07) — but left Camp Mather off a big bond measure planned for February 2008.

“They say $37 million you need up here, and how much you got in there for the ballot measure? Zip, zero,” McGoldrick told the Guardian. “It’s a familiar pattern: you underfund the hell out of something, and then you turn around and say, ‘We, the public sector, cannot handle taking care of this.'<0x2009>”

Rec and Park spokesperson Rose Dennis denies there are plans to privatize Camp Mather or that its omission from the bond measure is telling. “Many people disagreed — including you — with the funding needs and whether we could back it up,” she explained as the reason for its omission from the bond measure.

In his Oct. 1 endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said, “We actually made some commitments just this last week with Sup. McGoldrick to help support his efforts, because he’s very protective of Camp Mather, and I appreciate his leadership on this, to help resource some of the needs up there without privatizing, without moving in accordance with your fears.”

And while Newsom said he hoped to avoiding privatizing Camp Mather, he refused to say he wouldn’t: “I’m not suggesting it’s off the table, because I’m not necessarily sure that the conditions that exist today will be conditions that exist tomorrow, and I will always be open to argument.”

But at least the Camp Mather and golf arguments have been happening mostly in public. That’s what voters intended in 1983 when they passed Proposition J, which requires public hearings, a staff study, and a vote by the Board of Supervisors before city services can be privatized. Yet over the past couple of years, there’s been an effort to quietly shift operations at a half-dozen rec centers away from city programs and toward private nonprofits.

It’s called Rec Connect. Its supporters bill it as an innovative effort to bring much-needed recreation programs to underserved, low-income neighborhoods. “This is a pilot program to see if a collaboration between a community-based organization and a rec center yields a richer program and a more engaged community,” said Margaret Brodkin, director of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which created the program and oversees that and other uses of the city’s Children’s Fund.

But to members of the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — which includes most city employees and has filed grievances challenging Rec Connect — the program is a sneaky attempt to have underpaid, privately funded workers take over services that should be provided by city employees, who are better paid, unionized, and accountable to the public.

“The city took funds from the city’s coffers and gave them to the Department of Children, Youth and [Their] Families,” Margot Reed, a work-site organizer for the union, told the Guardian. “DCYF is using these funds, through Rec Connect, to contract out to private nonprofits work that rec staff were doing for a quarter of the cost.”

Brodkin was the longtime director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth — a perpetual thorn in the side of City Hall and the author of the measure that set aside some property taxes to create the Children’s Fund — before Newsom hired her to head the DCYF. She sees her current role as a continuation of her last one, and she sees Rec Connect as an enhancement of needed services rather than a privatization.

“There is a commitment that no jobs would be lost. I’m a big supporter of the public sector,” Brodkin said, while acknowledging that the RPD is chronically underfunded. “I am certainly aware of the resources issue at Rec and Park…. I’d be a happy camper if the Rec and Park budget was doubled. But I’d still believe in this program and say it offers a richer experience.”

Rec Connect began in 2005 with a study that looked at unmet recreational needs and evaluated facilities that might be good places to bring in community-based organizations to offer specialized classes. The whole program was financed through a mix of public funds and grants from private foundations. The three-year pilot program started just over a year ago.

“The Rec Connects,” Newsom told the Guardian, “are a way of leveraging resources and getting more of our CBOs involved and using these great assets and facilities, instead of limiting use to the way things have been done.”

Rec Connect director Jo Mestelle denied that the initiative is a privatization attempt.

“Rec and Park brings the facilities, the sports, and traditional recreation. The CBOs bring the youth-development perspective and nontraditional programming,” Mestelle said. “Hopefully, together we build a community that includes youth-leadership groups and advisory councils.”

Few would dispute the need for more after-school or other youth programs, particularly in the violence-plagued Western Addition, where some of the Rec Connect centers are. But the means of providing these programs is something new for San Francisco, starting with the fact that even though Mestelle works in the DCYF office, her salary is paid for entirely by private foundations.

That relationship and those funders aren’t posted anywhere or immediately available to the public, but Brodkin agreed to provide them to the Guardian. They include the Hellman Family Philanthropic Foundation ($50,000), the Hearst Foundation ($50,000), the San Francisco Foundation ($128,000), the Haas Foundation ($100,000), and the SH Cowell Foundation ($150,000).

Brodkin and Mestelle characterized those foundations as fairly unimpeachable, and Brodkin defended the arrangement as part of a national trend: “The thing that’s odd about SEIU’s perspective is this is happening all over.”

That’s precisely the point, SEIU’s Robert Haaland says.

“It’s been a strategy since the ’70s to, as [conservative activist] Grover Norquist calls it, ‘starve the beast,'<0x2009>” or defund government programs, Haaland said. “On a national level there is a lot going on that impacts us locally.”

Minutes from a recent Recreation and Park Commission meeting confirm that rec center directors have only about $1,000 each year to cover the cost of buying basketballs, team jerseys, referee whistles, and other basic sports and safety supplies. The SEIU grievance also notes that recreation staff positions have decreased by a third just as senior management positions increased by a third.

“We don’t have enough dollars for $20-an-hour rec center staff who are directly responsible for the kids and are well known to the community. We believe kids deserve great coaches, consistency, longevity, and commitment,” Reed said.

SEIU Local 1021 chapter president Larry McNesby is also the Rec and Park manager who oversees Palega Park, one of the Rec Connect sites. He told the Guardian that while his rec directors are “under pressure from the mayor to show him numbers of people that they are serving,” Rec and Park’s new online registration fails to reflect the “hundreds of drop-ins” that rec staff serve on a daily basis.

But he said the department has been set up to fail by chronic underfunding.

“I’d love Rec Connect and DCYF to be on a level playing field, because my directors could out-recreate theirs any day,” McNesby said. “You can’t just eliminate our jobs and replace them with someone who makes just above minimum wage.”

Actually, Brodkin and Mestelle note that negotiations with SEIU over Rec Connect have resulted in a guarantee that no jobs will be replaced and an agreement by the city as to 250 different tasks that the Rec Connect CBOs can’t perform. Still, they say the program brings innovation to a stagnant city agency.

“Before Rec Connect the rec centers always had a Ping-Pong table and some board games, but some of them were really poor, many were tired looking, none had computers or Internet. So we’ve had to think outside the box. Rec [and] Park is a big department, and it’s not always efficient,” Mestelle said.

Public records show that in 2006, the DCYF, whose primary function is to administer grants, sent $1 million in public money to Rec Connect from the Children’s Trust Fund, a pool of cash the city gathers each year by levying 3¢ per dollar of property tax.

Both Rec Connect and city workers stress the importance of offering a range of good programs to young people. “Our work is at a more social level,” McNesby says. “Every minute a kid spends in a rec center is a minute they’re not breaking into a car or victimizing someone or being victimized.”

The question is who should provide those programs. “It’s society’s value system that controls where the money goes,” Rec and Park spokesperson Dennis said. “It’s a really provocative discussion. There are some very compelling trade-offs argued in convincing fashion by intelligent people on both sides. These aren’t easy decisions.”

But the union people say that when it comes to Rec Connect, that discussion isn’t happening in public forums in a forthright way. As Reed said, “Gavin Newsom never went to the voters and said, ‘Here’s what we want to do: cut the rec staff and bring in private nonprofits.'”

41st Anniversary Special: Psych out

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> gwschulz@sfbg.com

San Francisco is a beautiful place. But it’s also a city where an extraordinary number of people suffer from mental health problems, sometimes quietly, sometimes visibly. City government has always taken on the burden of caring for those who really need it, but the Gavin Newsom administration has been trying to outsource that obligation in recent years.

Department of Public Health director Mitch Katz has tried for years to trim the number of psychiatric-care beds maintained by San Francisco General Hospital. He proposes to replace those services by contracting them out to local nonprofit Progress Foundation, which earned most of its $11.5 million in revenue last year from government sources.

The proposal is for Progress to develop and operate a community-based psychiatric treatment center as an alternative to SF General’s emergency-room and inpatient beds. A key difference would be that the alternative treatment would be voluntary and cater to those without severe symptoms.

Katz wants to eliminate 14 of SF General’s beds and reduce the number of patients it assesses by 30 percent. Add to that seven other beds that were stripped of funding two years ago, and it’s clear that mental health treatment in San Francisco is changing.

"It’s a problem we have to solve by coming up with alternatives," Katz told the board’s budget committee Oct. 10, "because it’s not right for that person, or for the cost to the system, that [they] be in a locked ward. It’s more downstream alternatives."

Opponents of the cuts, however, including psych nurses at SF General, led by the hospital’s chief of psychiatry, say the Progress proposal might complement SF General’s services but it would be dangerously shortsighted to think it can replace them.

Private-sector hospitals in San Francisco have already cut a combined 100 psych beds over the past 10 years, leaving behind only 75. Patients relying on Medi-Cal subsidies end up at SF General more than ever. Admissions, in fact, have climbed by as much as 50 percent in the past decade.

"I don’t want to be alarmist," said Alfredo Mireles, a psychiatric nurse at SF General who is opposing the cuts, "but we have this one guy who’s been in and out of here since his teens. He’s in his 30s now. He’s smart, college educated. But he has these violent outbursts with no remorse."

The man had assaulted a police officer just the night before, Mireles said. He recalled another patient who was so paranoid he wouldn’t come out of his room to eat. He had ended up in the emergency room after not eating for eight days.

Nonetheless, SF General’s psych ward maxed out last December for the first time in its history, forcing police offers to divert patients to jail or to hospitals unprepared to deal with them. All those facilities can do is strap down the patients or lock them in seclusion until a slot opens at SF General.

"You have to be very acute to get admitted," psych nurse Stacey Murphy said, referring to SF General. "But then we can’t get rid of people, because nobody wants them. They’re not acute enough to technically belong in our hospital, but they belong in a locked facility or in board and care."

Murphy explained that Progress won’t be able to handle certain patients now living in a sort of gray area at SF General — between being willingly and unwillingly hospitalized — such as the drug addled or violent. And that’s one problem with privatization in general: corporations and nonprofits will gladly take over profitable services, but the hard or expensive cases often fall to government … or simply through the cracks.

Progress argues that SF General spends too much time and money on patients who have serious mental health problems but aren’t so acute that they need to be locked up. Its idea is to put psych patients back into the city but help alleviate the misery they might otherwise endure alone or in a maddeningly sterile hospital. It seems to think the hard cases aren’t that hard.

"The time and resources devoted to this group of clients in a psychiatric crisis who are not hospitalized represents a cost to the mental health system that is unnecessary and avoidable if the intervention, triage, assessment, and treatment can occur in a community setting," the Progress Foundation’s June proposal reads.

"To the extent that there are people who would do better if we really wrapped services around them, shouldn’t we all focus on those people who would accept services voluntarily?" Katz asked the committee. "I think to focus a lot of our resources trying to convince people to take treatment against their will as outpatients when so many people would benefit from more loving, positive care, I don’t think it’s the right priority."

Piers Mackenzie still views Katz’s plan as poor public policy. His daughter, then 22, required a brief stay at SF General’s psych ward during a sudden mental health catastrophe four years ago. The event politicized Mackenzie, and he has since agitated against attempts by Katz to scale back psychiatric services at the hospital.

"I couldn’t think of a more retrogressive step, simple as that," Mackenzie said. "When there’s a proven need for more beds than there are presently, to cut them is just plain idiotic. I don’t understand it."

41st Anniversary Special: Connect the Connects

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› steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom has created an entirely new branch of city government that is private, funded by undisclosed corporate donations, staffed by volunteers who are often city employees or his campaign donors, and unaccountable to any internal controls or outside scrutiny.

Yet rather than being a cause for concern, Newsom has touted San Francisco Connect and its four subprograms — Project Homeless Connect, Tech Connect, Green Connect, and Project Children and Families Connect — as his proudest achievement, a model he is actively exporting to other cities.

According to its Web site, "The mission of SF Connect is to mobilize residents and sectors for a stronger San Francisco. SF Connect is about engaged residents volunteering their talent and time for the City, as well as innovative partnerships between the private, public, and social [nonprofit] sectors."

Green Connect (and "partners" that include Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Oracle), does cleanup and tree planting. Tech Connect (and partners Netgear.com and Hewlett Packard) works on "digital inclusion." And Project Homeless Connect (Gap, Visa, AT&T, Blue Shield, IBM, the Hotel Council, and Charles Schwab among its partners) does homeless outreach events.

During his endorsement interview with the Guardian, we asked Newsom about the programs and how they allow the private sector to take a more active role in delivering public services on behalf of city government, sometimes with the help of public resources. Is that a model he likes?

"Oh, you’d better believe that!" Newsom said. "Am I for actual responsibility and civic service and duty? You’d better believe it. I think it should be mandated for everyone who graduates from our public education system. I think they should be forced to give back and contribute in community service. What the Connects are all about is community service and connecting the dots. The Rec Connects, which may be what you’re referring to, is a way of leveraging resources and getting more of our [community-based organizations] involved."

All of those involved with SF Connect also seem to sing its praises. But there’s another side to Newsom’s feel-good approach to delivering public services: they often displace social services delivered by qualified providers, supplement underfunded city services with private providers rather than simply fixing and funding them, provide wedges for corporations to take over public spheres (as the Google-EarthLink wi-fi deal through Tech Connect very nearly did), and allow corporations to buy influence with unregulated contributions to a politician’s pet program.

"If you look at the ways of privatizing, volunteering is one, and it sounds nice," said Margot Reed, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021.

Yet that volunteerism sometimes replaces services that previously were provided by government or nonprofit agencies whose contracts and performance could be scrutinized. But Newsom’s approach through SF Connect doesn’t allow that kind of transparency.

To illustrate the problem, the Guardian made a Sunshine Ordinance records request to the Mayor’s Office, asking for a complete breakdown of the budgets of all the Connect programs. The office refused to provide the information, referring us instead to SF Connect, but that organization has a history of refusing to provide the Guardian and other media organizations with its budget and donor lists.

Last year the San Francisco Chronicle fought the Newsom administration for two months to get it to reveal the donor list, finally winning the release of the names of donors who had agreed to be disclosed (some asked for their money to be returned instead). SF Connect’s donors included PG&E, which gave $25,000; Google investor Ron Conway, who gave $100,000; Wells Fargo Bank, which gave $20,000; and Carmen Policy (the former 49ers top dog who was recently named to push a June ballot measure on a new stadium that Newsom wants to build), who gave $2,500. Other donors included Newsom appointees, contributors, and companies that do business with the city.

When we tried to get a current list of donors, staffers didn’t respond to Guardian phone calls or e-mails.

We also asked Newsom’s office for a complete breakdown of city staff time, money, and other resources that have gone into supporting the Connect programs, knowing that city staff have been involved in their events and e-mails have gone out from city offices.

"There is no line item in any budgets nor any reporting within our office on time spent coordinating with SF Connect," Joe Arellano from the Mayor’s Office of Communications responded by e-mail after repeated requests for answers.

That’s probably because there seems to be no clear line drawn between where the private SF Connect ends and where the public-sector Mayor’s Office begins. Call the phone number on the San Francisco Connect Web site for Project Homeless Connect, and it rings at the desk of Judith Crane in the Department of Public Health.

Even getting a list of privatization proposals by Newsom hasn’t been easy. The Mayor’s Office cited technical inadequacies when we asked it to search all of Newsom’s speeches, press releases, e-mails, and other documents for the words "public-private partnership," a favorite Newsom phrase.

We know that he’s unsuccessfully sought to privatize jail health services, security at the Asian Art Museum, and the city’s golf courses (see "Bilking the Links," page 22) and to create a citywide wireless Internet system run by Google and EarthLink.

But ask Newsom about it, as we did, and you’ll hear his semantic gymnastics: "Privatization is failing, so I’m not pro-privatization. I don’t look to privatize. I look for ways to manage more creatively and more efficiently."

41st Anniversary Special: Bus stop

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

There’s a money room in the basement of 1 South Van Ness, where the Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates Muni, is headquartered. Workers literally count by hand bags of cash and coins taken in as fares from passengers throughout the day.

When Muni recently needed to pull some of those unionized bean counters away from the money room to staff kiosks around the city where transit passes are sold, its managers hoped to replace them with workers from a private contracting outfit.

The plan unsettled the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which persuaded Muni against the idea and instead encouraged it to create 10 new full-time city positions to cover the work that was needed. But the MTA’s immediate turn to the private sector is telling.

Powerful local unions would no doubt fight it, but public-transit consultants working with the city have insisted that the outright privatization of San Francisco’s municipal transit system is worth consideration. Advisors to the Transit Effectiveness Project, first unveiled by Mayor Gavin Newsom during a 2006 speech, insist nothing is too controversial for debate.

"There’s nothing we’ve been told to take off the table," a consultant hired by the city told the San Francisco Chronicle late last year.

The Transit Effectiveness Project’s final recommendations are expected next year, when it’s likely Newsom will be starting his second and final term. Big segments of Muni have already been privatized over the years. In fact, Controller’s Office records show the MTA has privatized far more formerly public services over the past two decades than any other city department by far.

In 1983 voters passed Proposition J, authorizing the city to contract out services performed by city workers who’d passed civil service exams to prove their skills as long as the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution certifying a cost savings. The MTA issued $46.5 million worth of private contracts last year covering 689 positions, according to figures maintained by the Controller’s Office.

Muni has used private security guards since 1975, and 400 private workers handle paratransit services, which aid the disabled. Towing, janitorial, meter-collection, and citation-information services have all been privatized. In total, the MTA’s purported cost saving is as much as $20 million per year.

But that’s a sliver of MTA’s $680 million budget, and there are perennial fears of more privatization pushes. This fall’s Muni reform measure, Proposition A, nearly went to the ballot with language that could have allowed millions of dollars in new privatized work at Muni without review from civil service commissioners, but it was removed at the insistence of labor leaders.

San Diego privatized many of its transit services in the ’80s, gradually contracting out services as public employees retired. By last year about half of San Diego’s bus routes were managed by three private contractors, including Violia, an Illinois company that also runs Muni’s paratransit services. Labor leaders say service in San Diego suffered under privatization, and they oppose similar changes here.

"Whenever you contract out a department, whenever you let go of control, then you don’t have control of the product," Cristal Java, an organizer for SEIU Local 1021, told the Guardian.

Prop. A’s language was changed to preserve union jobs if new routes and lines are introduced that may otherwise have been susceptible to privatization, but there are no assurances that city officials won’t eventually point to Muni’s widely bemoaned system deficiencies and claim that further contracting out is necessary.

"We see the same operational problems, and hiring new full-time, permanent people is a way to deal with it instead of contracting out," Java said. "The unions, allies, and MTA got together to make Prop. A something that worked for everyone."

41st Anniversary Special: Privatize the airport?

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› gwshulz@sfbg.com

In August 2006 the five commissioners who oversee San Francisco International Airport discussed renewing a small contract with a consulting outfit called John F. Brown Co.

The contract’s value doesn’t matter as much as the advice the outfit was giving. Brown is helping San Francisco prepare for 2011, when an agreement SFO maintains with several airlines is set to expire.

This, the folks at the airport realize, is a very big deal — one that could cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars and tempt city officials to try to privatize one of San Francisco’s most lucrative assets.

The contract that will expire four years from now is basically a lease the airlines pay in exchange for using SFO facilities like runways and terminals. The agreement was established in 1981 as part of a legal settlement with the airlines, and it permits the city to draw millions of dollars in concession revenue from the airport into San Francisco’s General Fund. Last year the city received nearly $22 million from the airport.

But San Francisco is one of the few cities in the nation that are allowed to take money that the airlines pay for landing and use it to subsidize other city services. And the airlines have shown little desire to keep paying fees that are above what the airport needs to break even on its operations.

Nobody is talking publicly about what will happen after 2011, but it’s entirely possible that the airlines, with the support of the federal government, will refuse to keep subsidizing San Francisco’s General Fund. So $22 million per year in city revenue could suddenly dry up.

If the mayor is someone like Gavin Newsom, he or she will be looking for an easy answer — and a lot of people will argue that San Francisco should follow the trend set by airports in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh and head toward a private management contract.

The Reason Foundation, a libertarian Los Angeles think tank, concluded in the 1990s that SFO could be worth as much as $888 million to the private sector; that number is almost certainly higher now. Imagine, for a moment, the deal the city would be offered: lose $22 million per year in revenue — or get close to $1 billion in cash by turning over the airport to a private operator on a long-term contract.

But the airport’s past experiments with privatization suggest that giving SFO to the private sector might not be such a good idea.

In 2001, Congress created a pilot program in which five cities, San Francisco among them, privatized their security screening of passenger, checkpoint, and baggage operations. Federal airport officials here hired Illinois company Covenant Aviation Security.

An investigation last year revealed that Covenant and SFO officials relying on surveillance cameras conspired to tip off personnel working at checkpoints when undercover federal inspectors were on their way to test possible security breaches.

A whistle-blower first revealed the scheme. Covenant, which partnered in the security venture with global weapons designer Lockheed Martin, was nonetheless rehired by the federal Transportation Security Administration late last year with a $314 million contract lasting until 2010, signed just weeks after an inspector general for the TSA’s parent bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, revealed the results of its probe.

What is perhaps the airport’s greatest privatization disaster began in 1997 and didn’t end until earlier this year. Managers at the airport formed a private, for-profit company called SFO Enterprises, which they hoped would join a consortium of other airports doing consulting and managing work around the world. The initial consulting contract was with a Honduran airport.

The plan turned into a disaster, leaving the airport in Honduras worse off. By the time San Francisco’s controller caught up with the scheme in an investigation completed in January, he declared the city could lose as much as $1.5 million, with much of it poorly accounted for.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

These are some of the things that Mayor Gavin Newsom has moved to turn over to the private sector in the past four years:

Housing for the mentally ill

Public golf courses

Camp Mather

The entire city broadband infrastructure

The city’s new power plants

Homeless outreach

Environmental cleanup

Recreation programs

Jail health services

Security guards at public institutions

Development of tidal energy

Reconstruction of public housing

And, of course, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. still controls the city’s power grid (illegally).

Yet when we talked to the mayor about privatization recently, he told us he’s generally against it. "Privatization is failing," he said. "So I’m not pro-privatization. I don’t look to privatize."

What’s going on here?

Well, for starters, the mayor isn’t being entirely candid. Newsom’s administration has been moving aggressively to adopt programs with names like "public-private partnerships" to take over jobs that ought to be in the public sector. Even when there’s something that is clearly the job of government — like building the information highway that will be more important than roads and bridges in the future — the mayor tries first to get the private sector to do it. "I look for ways to manage more creatively and more efficiently," Newsom said.

That’s in part because, for all his talk of bold initiatives, the mayor is a timid chief executive. At a time when politicians of all stripes around the nation are afraid to talk about tax hikes, afraid to talk about the value of the public sector, afraid to do anything that might remind people that Ronald Reagan was wrong, letting the private sector take the lead is easy and painless. As Sup. Jake McGoldrick told us, "I suspect that [Newsom] succumbs to the path of least resistance there because of the tremendous amount of pressure that the private sector puts on trying to gain control over public assets."

It would take a fair amount of effort and public money to keep, say, the golf courses under city control. Giving them to a private company is easy. Maybe the courses ought to be turned into soccer fields; that costs money too. Perhaps the easiest thing is to let the Fisher family, of Gap fame and fortune, pay for it (the way the family paid for the new playing surface at Garfield) — and then put up big "Gap Field" signs with blue jean ads, let the Fishers hold private parties there on Sundays, or charge admission … or something else "creative and efficient."

That’s how it works these days: instead of taxing the rich and spreading the benefits around through a democratic system, we let the rich set the agenda. If Don Fisher’s willing to pay for new soccer fields, then we get new fields. Maybe he (or some other private outfit) wants to save the golf courses; OK, we’ll do that instead.

Newsom isn’t Reagan or Grover Norquist; he’s not a rabid ideological promoter of privatization. He’s just a tame elected official who won’t stand up and fight, who won’t make it clear that San Francisco isn’t for sale, who won’t put his immense political capital on the line to preserve the public sector for the public. And for that, he is a failure.

41st Anniversary Special: The privatization of San Francisco

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

William M. Tweed was one of the greatest crooks in American political history, a notorious Tammany Hall boss in New York who managed in the course of just a few years, starting in 1870, to steal more than $75 million (the equivalent of more than $1 billion today) from the city coffers. The way he did it was simple. As Elliott Sclar, a Columbia economist and expert on privatization, notes, Tweed took advantage of the fact that much of the work of city government was contracted out to private companies. Boss Tweed controlled the contracts; the contractors overcharged the city by vast sums and kicked back the money to Tammany Hall.

This is a rather extreme example, but not, Sclar argues, an atypical one: the worst corruption scandals in American history usually involve private contractors and public money. In fact, he argues, privatization is almost by its nature a recipe for scandal and corruption.

Nothing in the public sector — no incompetence, no waste, no bureaucratic bungling — begins to compare with what happens when private operators get their hands on public money. And the cost of monitoring contracts, making sure contractors don’t cheat or steal, and forcing them to act in ways that reflect the public interest is so high that it dwarfs any savings that privatization seems to offer.

That’s the message of the Guardian‘s 41st anniversary issue.

It’s relatively easy to investigate government malfeasance. The records are public, the players are visible, and the laws are on the side of the citizens.

But when Bruce B. Brugmann started the Guardian in 1966 with his wife, Jean Dibble, he realized that the real scandals often took place outside City Hall. They involved the real powerful interests, the giant corporations and big businesses that were coming to dominate the city’s skyline and its political life. The details were secretive, the money hidden.

One of the first big stories the paper broke, in 1969, involved perhaps the greatest privatization scandal in urban history, the tale of how Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had stolen San Francisco’s municipal power, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The famous Abe Ruef municipal graft scandals of the early 20th century, the Guardian wrote, were "peanuts, birdseed compared to this."

When I first came to work here, in 1982, Brugmann used to tell me that daily papers, which loved to try to expose some poor soul who was collecting two welfare checks or a homeless person who was running a panhandling scam, were missing the point. "If you look hard enough, you can always find a small-time welfare cheat," he’d tell me. "We want to know about corporate welfare, about the big guys who are stealing the millions."

And there were plenty.

In his new book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Knopf), Robert Reich, the economist and former secretary of labor, argues that during the cold war, when American politicians railed against the socialist model of economic planning, this country actually had a carefully planned economy. The planning wasn’t done by elected officials; it was done by a handful of oligarchic corporations and military contractors.

Modern San Francisco was born in that same cauldron. During World War II, captains of industry and military planners took control of the city’s economy, directing resources into the shipyards, collecting labor from around the country to build and repair Navy vessels, and making sure the region was doing its part to defeat the Axis powers. It worked — and when the war ended the generals went away, but the business leaders stayed and quietly, behind closed doors, created a master plan for San Francisco. Downtown would become a new Manhattan, with high-rise office buildings and white-collar jobs. The East Bay and the Peninsula would be suburbs, with a rail line (BART) carrying the workers to their desks. Private developers, working under the redevelopment aegis, demolished low-income neighborhoods to build a new convention center and hotels.

Nobody ever held a public hearing on the master plan. And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that San Franciscans figured out what was going on.

By 1971 the fight against Manhattanization began to dominate the Guardian‘s political coverage. It would play center stage in San Francisco politics for two more decades. The paper ran stories about high-rises and freeways and environmental impact reports, but the real issue was the privatization of the city’s planning process.

Ronald Reagan soared into the White House in 1980, rolling over a collapsing Jimmy Carter and a demoralized, moribund Democratic Party. Reagan and his backers had an agenda: to dismantle American government as we knew it, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society, to get the public sector out of the business of helping people and give the benefits to private business. "Government," Reagan announced, "isn’t the solution. Government is the problem."

The Guardian was firmly planted on the other side. We supported public power, public parks, public services, public accountability. We had no blinders about the flaws of government agencies — I spent much of my time in the early years writing about the mess that was Muni — but in the end we realized that at least the public sector carried the hope of reform. And we saw San Francisco as a beacon for the nation, a place where urban America could resist the Reagan doctrine.

Unfortunately, the mayor of San Francisco in the Reagan years might as well have been a Republican. Dianne Feinstein’s faith in the private sector rivaled that of the new president. She turned the city’s future over to the big real estate developers. She vetoed rent control and gave the landlords everything they wanted. And when the budget was tight, she ignored our demands that downtown pay its fair share and instead raised bus fares and cut library hours.

When gay men started dying of a strange new disease, there was no public money or service program to help them, from Washington DC or San Francisco. So the community was forced to build a private infrastructure to take care of people with AIDS — and years later, as Amanda Witherell notes in this issue, those private foundations became secretive and unaccountable.

In 1994 we got a tip that something funny was going on at the Presidio. The Sixth Army was leaving and turning perhaps the most valuable piece of urban real estate on Earth over to the National Park Service … in theory. In practice, we learned, some of the biggest corporations in town had come together with a different plan — to create a privatized park — and Rep. Nancy Pelosi was carrying their water. Every detail of the Presidio privatization made the front page of the Guardian — and still, the entire Democratic Party power structure (and much of the environmental movement) lined up behind Pelosi. Now we have a corporate park on public land, with that great pauper George Lucas winning a $60 million tax break to build a commercial office building in a national park.

And still, it continues.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a rising star in the Democratic Party, who told us he’s no fan of privatization, demonstrated the opposite in one of his signature political campaigns this year: he tried (and is still trying) to turn over the city’s broadband infrastructure — something that will be as important in this century as highways and bridges were in the last — to a private company. That’s what the whole wi-fi deal (now on the ballot as Proposition J) is about; the city could easily and affordably create its own system to deliver cheap Internet access to every resident and business. Instead, Newsom wants the private sector to do the job.

The Department of Public Health is running public money through a private foundation in a truly shady deal. The mayor’s Connect programs operate as public-private partnerships. Newsom wants to privatize the city’s golf courses, and maybe Camp Mather. He’s prepared to give one of the worst corporations in the country — Clear Channel Communications — the right to build and sell ads on bus shelters (and nobody has ever explained to us why the city can’t do that job and keep all the revenue). Housing policy? That depends entirely on what the private sector wants — and when we challenged Newsom on that in a recent interview, he snidely proclaimed that the city simply has to follow the lead of the developers because "we don’t live in a socialist society."

This is not how the city of San Francisco ought to be behaving. Because when you give public land, public services, public institutions, and public planning initiatives to the private sector, you get high prices, backroom deals, secrecy, corruption — and a community that’s given up on the notion of government as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.

You start acting like the people who have been running Washington DC since 1980 — instead of promoting a city policy and culture that ought to be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America.

The Sean Penn-Matt Gonzalez rumor

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Wokette’s got this lovely nutty rumor that Sean Penn would give Matt Gonzalez $5 million to run against Gavin Newsom — as a Democrat. SFist picked up, wondering if it’s a joke.

Coupla problems with the item. First of all, Wonkette refers to Gonzalez as a “deputy mayor under Willie Brown,” which would be news to both of them. Second, folks, the deadline for filing as a candidate for mayor passed quite some weeks ago. The only way someone could file now is as a write-in — theoretically possible, but since abstentee voting has already begun, and by the time a campaign got up and running, a sizable percentage of the votes would already be cast, the whole thing seems rather implausible.

I think Wonkette heard some very old gossip and thought it was new.

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